Why Does DJ Hate Me?
by Meriem Clayton
Summary: DJ is out to get Daniel. As he learns why, he increasingly fears the damage is at his own hands. His career and relationships are at risk but, as they say, what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger. Rapes mentioned. Future story. 8&9 spoilers SD not SJ
1. Chapter 1

This story was written strictly for the purpose of entertainment. No attempt has been made to copyright any characters which may not have been originally created by the author, and no profit is made from this work of fiction. Any original characters and the stories themselves are the property of the author.

I'd like to give credit to Widespread Panic and their song, "Mercy." This is a wonderful, poetic tour de force that describes someone very bitter, drinking alone and haunted by the spirit of someone they hate. It inspired me to wonder what could ever make someone hate Daniel that much. The other song that should be mentioned is "Harlan, Kentucky" by Patti Lovelace. As I was formulating the story inspired by the first song, the second pointed me to a background for DJ.

Thanks my wonderful betas, Jess and Monica.

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Dr. Daniel Jackson read through the field report, his incredulity increasing with each screen. Twice he paged back to the beginning to make sure he was correct about the identity of the author. He didn't really notice when Dr. Ian Koch rapped on the door jamb and entered the office without waiting for an invitation. 

"What's up Daniel?" Ian asked his colleague and the head of the Archeology Department who was staring, transfixed, at the screen of his laptop, an expression of patent disbelief on his face. "You look like someone's reported evidence of leprechauns in their dig site," Ian observed idly, not really expecting anything very interesting by way of an answer. Daniel got excited about an awful lot of stuff over which Ian just could not work up any enthusiasm.

Daniel swiveled the computer around so that Ian could see the screen and the first page of the report. "Ah," Ian said. "Carl has turned in another one of his embarrassingly bad write ups. He's got to know where a body is buried to have ever gotten on this project."

Daniel briefly looked a little angry thinking about the infamous Carl. Sloppy careless scientific work bothered him acutely and his long running effort to ease Carl off his staff was well known. "Actually," Daniel said, "It's from Carl all right but it's absolutely excellent. It's like he got a new brain."

"Maybe he did," Ian said cryptically. "What SG team was he with when he did the work?"

Daniel scrolled down and supplied the answer, "SG-24."

"There you go," Ian said as if that settled everything.

"There I go where?" Daniel said, not tracking.

"Carl didn't do the work. Captain Cox either told him what to write or wrote it for him," Ian explained, making himself comfortable in Daniel's visitor chair.

"We don't have anyone on the archeology staff named Cox. For that matter we don't have any military personnel on the archeology staff by any name," Daniel pointed out.

"Yeah, I know. Deeje Cox has actually got everything needed for a Ph.D. in archeology except the dissertation. Passed all the courses and the prelims. I checked."

"Right," said Daniel, suspicious now that he was being teased yet again. His intensity and immersion in his work frequently made him an easy target.

Ian shrugged. "Believe what you want, Daniel. Not to change the subject but I came in here to talk to you about that funerary urn I brought back from P4H89 last week."

Daniel intended to investigate Cox further himself but the funerary urn led to something else which led to something else REALLY fascinating. It was two weeks before he came up for air again. He was catching up on his e-mail and came across an interesting looking informal paper. The scientists at Cheyenne Mountain were a frustrated group who couldn't publish out in the real world. They had taken to informally publishing among themselves and hoping in their hearts of hearts that, when the gate became public, they could rush all these neat articles right out to real journals. The paper that caught his eye was in the discipline of linguistics and presented a fascinating and very convincing explanation for a hitherto, truly puzzling aspect of Ancient script. The explanation incidentally undermined, very effectively, some theories he had put forward. Despite being disappointed to have the air let out of his personal balloons, he was very impressed when he finished. He went back to the beginning to see who had written it, not having noticed that fact when his eye had fallen first on the abstract and its tantalizing premise. The paper was by D.J. Cox, Ph.D., Linguistics, University of Chicago.

This was hard to believe for many reasons, most significantly, Daniel's secret prejudice that military people just weren't all that bright academically, Sam Carter being the exception that proved the rule. He did a look up on Cox's dissertation and read it at one sitting. It was good, not incredibly good, but good. He noted in passing that the dedication was a trifle eccentric. It was written in dialect, as if by Mark Twain, and said, "Fur papaw an' memaw an' mama. Purely do miss you'ins. I won't furgit."

He called the adviser listed. The man was a respected figure in linguistics although Daniel had never actually met him. He reached him during his office hours while he was working with a student and had to accept a promise of a call back. He waited impatiently until the elderly faculty member returned his call an hour later. "Deeje Cox is flat out miraculous," the man said.

"I read the dissertation and it was good but not really on that level," Daniel demurred respectfully.

"Ah yes. The final product was a lot less than it should have been because it was done in parallel with an undergraduate degree in Computer Science at Illinois Institute of Technology and participation in their Air Force ROTC program. She also did most of the coursework for a Ph.D. in Archeology during that time period," he explained. He went on to heap additional praise on Cox's head including divulging the fact that Cox had entered the Linguistics Ph.D. program at 18, having already earned an undergraduate degree with a double major in linguistics and archeology.

Daniel absorbed this information in stunned silence. D.J., or as everyone seemed to pronounce it, Deeje, Cox had the presumption to make a damned hobby out of linguistics! He had taken an unreasonable dislike to Cox for being military and this reinforced it.

A few days later he was in a meeting where he was the only civilian present. The room was full of military types discussing the best approach to getting at a valued find of ancient artifacts on an incredibly hostile world. Daniel broke in to say, "There needs to be someone along with some sense of archeology or you could end up damaging what you are trying to take away and negating the value of the whole mission. Let me come along."

SGC's commander looked with disfavor at Daniel and Daniel realized he had probably sounded condescending. "We have considered the archeological aspect, Dr. Jackson, and that's why we are going to send SG-24."

"I believe I am much better qualified than some amateur like Captain Cox," Daniel said, unwisely letting his feelings lead him into an unnecessarily pejorative statement.

"Actually, Dr. Jackson," came the reproof, "you are not better qualified. Not only has Captain Cox demonstrated repeatedly that she knows more about archeology than some of your staff members, she is extremely effective in combat." Daniel cringed at the oblique reference to Carl and resolved to redouble his efforts to dislodge him from the department.

"A regular raptor," another officer contributed.

"A raptor?" Daniel asked.

"She was black ops before she came here. She's the perfect soldier for that sort of work. Starts killing when you order her to and doesn't stop until ordered to. Very, very dangerous."

Daniel walked out the meeting not feeling friendly AT ALL to Deeje Cox. Two men from the briefing were right behind him. Colonel Harrison, who'd known Daniel since his first year on SG-1 15 years before, said, "Sorry, Dr. Jackson. You are a good man in a fight for a civilian and the gate affect has kept you in better shape than many 20 years younger than you but you're no Deeje Cox."

"Evidently not," Daniel said with ill grace, "especially since Cox is a woman." He was not in a good mood and he hated it when people brought up the gate effect, the recently confirmed age retarding affect of years of trips through the gate. It made him feel like a damn sideshow freak.

He went on his way then but just after turning the corner, he remembered he'd left a folder in the conference room. As he started to come back around the corner, he caught his name being mentioned in the conversation between the two officers who were still standing where he had left them. The other officer was telling Harrison, "I ran into Cox before the meeting and picked her brain a little about the situation on the planet since SG-24 had done a reconnaissance there. She was very circumspect but she raised some real doubts in my mind about whether we should really be letting Jackson go off-world where there's any risk at all."

"Really?" Harrison said and then the two men moved off and he didn't hear any more.

A few weeks later, he and Teal'c had decided to drop by a bar popular with Cheyenne Mountain personnel and play darts. Daniel pretty much sucked at darts but it seemed to really make Teal'c happy and they saw each other infrequently any more. Since the break up of the original SG-1 team after the disaster that had occurred under new leadership, Daniel had stopped going off world regularly but Teal'c continued, now a member of SG-10. When they entered the bar, they immediately spotted a group of Cheyenne Mountain noncoms. Daniel and Teal'c waved to them cordially and two of them burst out laughing uncontrollably. Daniel looked at Teal'c who looked back. Neither had a clue. "Do I have a kickme sign on my backside?" Daniel asked.

Teal'c looked blank. He had not been a geeky teenager and the butt of way too many jokes. "I do not understand, DanielJackson," was all he could contribute.

The dart board had a game already going and Teal'c and Daniel stood at the bar, nursing their beers and waiting their turn. A few minutes later a sergeant from the table that had greeted them so oddly when they entered passed them heading for the restrooms. Daniel didn't know what caused him to challenge the man. Maybe, on some level, he was wishing he had faced up to the bullies as a shy teen, years ahead of himself in school. "Sergeant Kelly, excuse me."

"Oh, hi, Dr. Jackson," Kelly returned, obviously a little embarrassed.

"Could you shed some light for me on what was going on when we came in? I don't mean to sound paranoid but it sure looked like the outbreak of hysteria was directly related to Teal'c and I," Daniel asked his voice even and non-confrontational.

The man was clearly uncomfortable but squared his shoulders, telegraphing his intention to be a stand up guy. "Look, Dr. Jackson, you're a good guy and you probably saved my friend Bobby's life during that incident on P3H89 so I'll be straight with you. Captain Cox was in here earlier with a couple of other officers. They were sitting at a table next to us. She did the most hysterical and, frankly mean, take off on you I can conceive of. She had your voice, your mannerisms, the whole thing down pat. She made you look like a confused geek who endangered the soldiers you went out with through utter cluelessness. She's good. I mean, I'm on your side but I still have to say, it was about the funniest thing I have ever seen in person in my whole life. I have to apologize to you for laughing at her." Daniel smiled and nodded his understanding. The man turned to go, but then turned back. "I'd watch my back, Dr. Jackson. I don't know why she hates you but it seems like she does. Be careful, sir. She's a raptor and dangerous to know."

Shortly after that, Daniel entered Sam's lab/office unannounced. She was so wrapped up in whatever was on her computer screen that he didn't want to startle her. He walked up behind her and saw that she was reading an e-mail and she looked aghast at its contents. Still, she kept reading. He didn't think much of people who snooped over other people's shoulders but his curiosity was killing him. Unfortunately, just as he started to read, Sam noticed him. She immediately stood up and blocked his view of the screen. "Hi, Daniel," she said, feigning a phony cheerfulness.

"Sam," Daniel said, moving very carefully through some unimaginable social minefield, "what's going on? What were you reading?"

"Reading?" she said as if she didn't know what the word meant.

"Reading on the screen," Daniel answered patiently but was unable to completely keep a little aggravation from creeping into his voice.

Sam sighed and came to a decision. "Okay, Daniel, I guess you really ought to know about this. She stepped aside so that he could see. It was a very scurrilous and clever poem at his expense. Sam said, reluctantly, as he read, "It's been circulating around the base for a week or so. I think it originally showed up in a restroom and people started quoting it to each other."

Daniel ducked his head and put his good analytical mind to work. It was only a matter of moments before he said, "Deeje Cox."

Sam was completely bewildered. "Who is Deeje Cox?" she asked.

"Captain D.J. Cox, SG-24," Daniel elaborated. "She seems to have it in for me."

"Why?" Sam asked. "You have to be the least offensive person I've have ever met. Sometimes you might run on a bit but your heart was so obviously in the right place and you care SO much. I can't imagine anyone going out of their way to make things unpleasant for you."

"Thanks, I think," Daniel said, thinking she made him sound a bit like an aging, toothless basset hound. Why did he keep letting it hurt him that her image of him seemed to be stuck between eunuch and the afore mentioned floppy dog? "This completely baffles me, Sam."

"Have you tried talking to her?" his friend asked. Daniel shook his head. "Well, shouldn't you?"

"And ask her what? I'd just sound paranoid with no more hard evidence than I've got," Daniel said, uncomfortably. This was all giving him flashbacks to a difficult adolescence. He hadn't understood why the cool kids, the jocks, the class clowns had all always come after him then and he didn't understand why Deeje Cox was after him now.

Sam laid a hand on his arm. "At least investigate her a little. Maybe you'll learn something that will help make sense of all this."

Daniel put a hand over Sam's and squeezed. "Thanks for being such a good friend, Sam."

"Any time," she said softly as he left.

Before he could figure out what he was supposed to do to get his hands on more information, Ian walked into his office looking troubled. "Daniel, I just heard something that really concerns me."

Daniel was surprised by how far from his usual laidback demeanor Ian was. "Yeah?" Daniel asked, encouraging him to go further.

"Understand that I feel like people's sexual preferences are up to them," Ian said, not looking at Daniel.

"WHAT!" Daniel asked.

Ian raised a hand as if to placate him. "That's not the point. It's just that the rumor going around about you is more than that. It could be career ending for Colonel Carter and send General O'Neill straight to retirement as well as damaging for you if the right people hear it and believe it."

"What did you hear?" Daniel asked slowly, trying to remain calm.

"They're saying that the three of you had some sort of group sex thing going on when General O'Neill was in SG-1 and then when he was the CO here. In fact, they say that you guys still get together and get it on occasionally, the Gate effect," Daniel winced, "making it all good, you know, even though General O'Neill's is in his sixties now." Ian added, grimacing, "I knew no one else would ever tell any of you to your faces and I felt like you had to know. When I first heard it, people were telling it more like a joke. Like 'Can you believe the crazy things that people will say?' but lately it seems like some people are starting to think there just might be something to it," Ian acknowledged reluctantly. "You're all real life heroes. I can't figure out how something like this ever got started."

Daniel was thinking Cox. He really didn't have any evidence but somehow he was positive that the elusive Captain Cox had something to do with this, just as the poem had somehow seemed like her doing. He was only mildly concerned about himself. As a civilian, it might not even cost him his job. The thought of people believing this of Sam, the finest woman he knew, or his friend, Jack O'Neill, a man whose integrity was absolute, was another thing. Added to his concern for them was the fact that unbidden images started appearing in his mind of kinky scenes with Sam and Jack. He had been in love with Sam for years and had suppressed it so ruthlessly that absolutely no one had any idea. Sometimes he doubted it himself and then she'd do something innocent, perhaps laugh a certain way, and the love would come rising up from a hidden depth and require a thorough bashing. Fact. Sam was in love with Jack. Fact. Jack wasn't capable of letting himself love anyone. So there they all were, light years away from group sex, that was for sure.

Daniel went to Walter then. The master sergeant would be the one to give him the information if anyone could. "I've looked her up on the Web and found out some information about her education at the University of Chicago and the Illinois Institute of Technology," he was explaining a few minutes later. "What I need to know is something about her personal life. Hell, I don't even know what D.J. stands for."

"Dr. Jackson, the kind of information you're looking for is part of her personnel record and that really isn't 'for public' information," Walter responded, troubled. Daniel could see that he wanted to help but he was a good soldier and not one to break rules.

"She appears to be launching some sort of vendetta against me and it's picking up steam," Daniel said. "If there's anyway at all, you could give me even some crumbs that might help me to figure this out, I would be eternally grateful."

Walter pushed a piece of paper around his desk, scooting it back and forth. Finally, he said, "I might just have a folder on my desk this afternoon. If I got up for an urgent call of nature, it might be at risk of being compromised. It's a good thing we have such honest people here at the Base."

Daniel nodded and said, "Yes. It is important to know our coworkers."

He returned on some flimsy pretext and the minute Walter headed for the restroom, Daniel leaned over the desk and pulled the file toward him. He hesitated for just a moment, suddenly afraid of what he might find, of what the initials D.J. were nudging at in the back of his mind. He told himself that he was being foolish, that he needed to protect himself and his friends and forced himself to open the file folder. 


	2. Chapter 2

It didn't take long at all to find what he needed in her file. The names that went with the initials were enough but, should he not believe them, there was the birth date and birthplace in east Tennessee and the mother's name, May. The father was listed as unknown but he wasn't really, not to Daniel. He was locked in shock and disbelief as he snuck out of Walter's office then, trying not to look furtive, but feeling unclean in so many ways.

"Oh May," he thought, feeling a huge wave of sadness rolling over him. "If only you could have loved me back." He hadn't thought about her when he was awake for years but asleep was a different story. Sha're's change to a Goa'uld had felt like rejection, the rejection he had already tasted from May and Sarah, and he had dreams sporadically over the years about Sha're that sometimes included May and Sarah and later Sam, all the women he had loved, turning their backs on him.

It hadn't started out like that. May was his first love, his first real kiss, and his initiation into sex. They had both been virgins and he had dared to dream that they would never be with anyone else but preserve this special and unique bond. He had been as much of a romantic fool as a preteen girl and let himself believe, for a brief euphoric moment, that he had found his soul mate. A very lonely life had been the desert after a rain for an evening and for the first two or three weeks after he returned to Chicago until he could no longer ignore the fact that she wasn't interested enough to stay in contact.

He went home early that night and looked for the journals that his friends had preserved, even when most of his things had been discarded after he had ascended. He was eternally grateful that they had never read them. Stuck in one of them were the letters. He dropped into a chair like a stone and unfolded the one on top. It was printed on notebook paper in pencil and dated 18 years after the birth date in Deeje's file. 

Dr. Jackson,

I dont say deer Dr. Jackson becuse your not deer to me. My granddaddy told me about u and how u did not want me and u ruint my mamma's life when she could had a career in Nashville. Well I dont want u neither I am grownup now and a high school graduate and my cousin told me that the child support stopped when I was 18 which is OK because I am marrying Billy Jeeters next week. We are having a baby soon. He has got a good job at a truck stop near I40 and we got us a trailer and I already got it fixed up real nice.

For the last time ever -- Your daughter,

Dani Jackson Cox

This barely literate scrawl did not, COULD not, come from a woman who started a Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago at 18. He looked at the next one. It was in the same hand on notebook paper again, although this notebook paper had been torn from a spiral notebook. It was dated the year before.

Deer Dr. Jackson,

My cousin who takes real good care of me says I have to write u onct a year because u are my daddy and pay child support. I think it is the least u could do considering what you did to my mama and how shes dead and all. He can make me write this stupid letter but he cant make me like it. I really like him and his wife other than this making me write these stupid letters. She is a real good cook. I am doing okay in school. I like NASCAR. My boy friend Billy wants to be a NASCAR driver or work on a pit crew someday I think that would be real cool. I do not hope u are fine.

Your daughter,

Dani Jackson Cox

This missive would have been written while she was getting a BS with a perfect average and a double major if Deeje Cox was Dani Jackson Cox.

She had been 10 before he'd even known she'd existed, years after May's death. It had been hard to get free but he had gone to Tennessee and tried to see her. Her grandfather and legal guardian had made it quite clear that he would not be allowed anywhere near her. "Dani, don't want to know you, no how," the old man said. "You ruint her mama's life and she's knows it." Her grandfather didn't have a phone but he wrote his daughter and the letters all came back, unopened with a child's scrawl on the back, "LEAV ME ALON."

To his shame, after her grandfather died when she was 11, he had accepted the suggestion too easily that she would be happier staying in Tennessee with her mother's relatives. He told himself that he had his career and he was gone off world so often that it would have been logistically very difficult to have an 11 year old living with him. He was lying to himself and he knew it. He was just at such a low point that he couldn't take the unremitting rejection any more. Surely this was nothing like the way his grandfather Nicolas Ballard had opted not to take him when his parents died. Dani was with family, not in foster homes, and vehemently did not want to live with him. But when he returned from ascension and regained his memory of her, he could no longer let himself off so easily. Her cousins had a phone and he had talked with her twice. She had been hostile and, frankly, not very bright. She was certainly not at all interested in living with him.

So what was real? Was his daughter Captain Deeje Cox or the sullen woman in the letters? If Cox hated him as much as she appeared to, than she could have somehow made up her identity to make it look like she was his daughter. That just boggled the mind and he couldn't believe it. That would have to make her hate him for some other reason and his own daughter was the only person he had ever really hurt. He also couldn't believe that there just happened to be two girls with the same name born on the same day in the same relatively small place. So, if the military officer undermining him was really his daughter, who was the girl who had written these letters and talked to him on the phone?

The easy thing would be to confront Captain Cox but he couldn't make himself do it, not without a lot more understanding as to how this had happened. Instead he used accumulated vacation time to go to Sevierville, Tennessee, to the address of the second set of cousins she had lived with after her grandfather died. It was in a modest neighborhood of small houses, generally well maintained, except for this one that corresponded to her address. It stood empty with a neglected yard. The neighbors looked at him suspiciously and no one admitted to knowing anything. He finally was getting back in his rental car when an elderly woman in a bizarre combination of colors and patterns between her blouse, her skirt, her knee socks, and her embroidered sweater, banged on the passenger window. "Young man," she said, "carry me down to the Piggly Wiggly and back and I'll tell you a story. While we're there, you can buy me some smokes."

"Just tell me how to find it and I'd be glad to," Daniel agreed.

She settled back in her seat and played with the controls for a couple of blocks, seemingly very entertained by getting the seat exactly the right distance back from the dashboard and inclined at the right angle. Then she went to fiddling with the way the vents were aligned in her direction. When she pulled the visor down to see the mirror and began to fuss with her thin curls and reposition her two pink plastic butterfly barrettes, Daniel was ready to scream, his normal patience with children and the old nowhere to be found. He snapped the visor back and said, gritting his teeth, "You promised me a story."

"No need to be so teechy about it," she complained. "So here's your story. You was looking for Carson Cox and his wife Fern, right?"

"Actually, I was looking for information about their cousin, Dani Cox, who lived with them as a teenager."

The old lady suddenly sat upright and looked ready to bolt. "Pull this car over young man. I changed my mind."

"Please, ma'am, I don't know why you changed your mind, but I really need to find out about Dani," Daniel pleaded.

"Look me in the eyes, young man," the woman directed. When he turned toward her, she screeched, "You're going to get us kilt. Look at the road." After Daniel complied, she said, as if talking to the mentally challenged, "Pull over first and then look in my eyes."

She fixed him with a stare once they were at the curb. "Look right here," she said tapping her checks right below her faded blue eyes. "Now tell me what you want to know about Dani for. Promise me you mean her no harm."

"She's my daughter, Ma'am. I haven't ever met her and I think it's past time. I want to understand who she is first," Daniel said, willing her to hear the sincerity in his voice.

"You do look just like her in the eyes and I think the mouth's the same," the woman said, evidently deciding to believe him. "Well," she said, now lowering her voice to a whisper even though she and Daniel were alone in the car and the windows were rolled up, "she being your daughter and you never having met is right curious. She just lived with them about two or three year and then she was gone. They told all us neighbors that she went to live with her daddy." The woman leaned back, looking very smug at her possession of such shocking knowledge.

"I got letters from this address from her until she was 18. I talked to her on the phone twice when she was 15," Daniel said.

The woman looked past him, staring off somewhere and considering. "Aha," she said suddenly. "I tell you what I think happened. They had a daughter, same age as Dani. Dumb ox of a girl. Got herself pregnant and married that idiot Jeeters boy. You talked to her, not Dani." She nodded emphatically. "Betcha that's what happened. You was sending money for her, right?" When Daniel nodded, she said, "There you go. Fern and Carson was keeping the checks."

"So where are they now, Carson and Fern?" Daniel asked.

"Well, Carson finally took off with one of the women he was cheating on Fern with. That was about 6 months ago. Fern went to live with her daughter in Florida somewhere. She wasn't well liked and I doubt if there'll be anyone who has any idea of the address."

Daniel rested his forehead on the steering wheel. "Tell me about her, about Dani."

"She was a fey thing," the woman said, fondly. "Too good for Carson's bunch. Had her head in a book all the time. Practically lived at the library when she could get away from the house. Fern did work her pretty hard with chores. The kids teased her about being a book worm, about giving herself airs, at first that is."

She paused and looked at him. Daniel included cultural anthropology in his credentials and had worked with extracting information from informants before. His part of the bargain was to react and prompt her. "Why do you say 'at first'?"

"Well, thing is, she knows how to fight. Somebody taught that little girl how to fight and fight dirty. After a little bit, she took one of the bullies out. Beat him up, she did, even though he was much bigger. They had to pull her off him. She broke his arm." The woman shook her head slowly. "You don't want her as an enemy. She's like a pit bull if she gets started."

Another pause. "How do you think she learned to fight like that?" Daniel asked. Part of the description sounded like a daughter of his but the other part was the raptor described to him in the briefing back at Cheyenne Mountain.

"Her granddaddy, Hector, he was known around here even though he lived out in the county. Ornery. Real ornery. Even at that he was the best of them Coxes. He was a God fearing, church going man. He probably learned her. You got to wonder, though, what she might have picked up from the first pack of family she lived with after Hector died, her cousin Barbie and Barbie's boy friend. That'd be before Carson and Fern."

Daniel was getting the rhythm. "Tell me about them."

"Here's the thing. They had a meth lab. There's a lot of them all over the county. Sheriff's department busts one up seems like practically daily. You get some trailer set up on a wooded lot on a back road and you start making crystal meth. Well, it blew up. Kilt them all. Carson went and got her right off from the neighbor where she'd been visiting when it went up. Nobody wanted her talking to the deputies. I think Carson was selling some product for Barbie. He sure is shifty enough."

"You seem fond of her. You must have talked to her a lot. Did she ever say anything about me?" Daniel asked.

"She was kind to me. She'd come to my house and we'd drink sweet tea and talk. She talked a lot about her grandparents. Her mama died real early on and it was the grandparents that raised her up. She only talked about you once. She said her granddaddy told her that he promised her mama when her mama was dying that he'd make you pay. Then Dani, she promised her memaw when she was dying." Daniel looked unsure of her meaning. "Lots of folks call their grandma, memaw, and their granddaddy, papaw. Her granddaddy made her promise too. Folks around here, they got long memories. People aren't real strong on forgiving and forgetting. They make fun of us in like "The Beverly Hillbillies" about feuding and all. The real thing isn't funny."

She fixed him with an eagle eye. "Would it a kilt you to have sent her a birthday gift or Christmas gift every onct in a while? Maybe written her a letter." She took in Daniel's stunned expression and made a face. "Either you're a better actor than that fellow Marlon Brando who was in the last moving picture I ever seen or you were sending her gifts and letters and that lot was keeping them from her. Probably her granddaddy too. He purely hated you. Some daddies they want their little girls to stay pure so bad they can't even look at em if they fall from grace, you know."

Daniel felt so ill it was hard to keep talking, hard to keep extracting more memories from this woman that he didn't know what to do with once he had them. "What did Deeje look like?" he finally asked. There was a question that shouldn't produce any more unpleasant information.

"I got a picture. I keep it with me. My grandchildren are a long way off and I don't never see them. Dani, she was more like my grandbaby, in some ways that my flesh and bone." She pulled out a battered wallet and extracted a dog eared photo. "You can see there. She was all arms and legs, thin and gawky, at first. They teased her a lot about that too before she taught them better. But then, right before she left, she started to fill out. She probably wasn't what you'd call pretty but she had these big blue eyes, like yours, I guess, and so much spirit. Made her more appealing than lots of girls who are actually prettier. Carson seemed to take notice."

Daniel remembered being a foster child. He remembered the indignities he had faced and had seen other kids face. He was getting a sick feeling about why Dani had left. Still he had to ask, "Did she say anything to you? Do you have any idea why she ran off?"

She looked at him, sadly. "I wish she would have come to me. I was an old lady even then but maybe I coulda done something. She didn't. But I know that skunk, Carson Cox. He went after everything that looked like it was female. When Dani started filling out, he probably went after her." She looked at him reassuringly. "Don't suspect he actually was able to do anything to her though."

"Why? If you never talked to her about it, why do you assume that?"

The answer was simple. "She would have hurt him real bad, maybe kilt him, but he was fine."

Daniel was staring out the windshield but he wasn't seeing the bird dropping splat in the middle of the windshield any more than he was seeing the two boys who rode by on their bikes, the dog chasing a squirrel, or the other cars that passed frequently. The old woman waited patiently but eventually her need for her smokes couldn't be denied and she tapped him on the arm. "How about we go on to the store now?" she asked. He put the car in gear again but she seemed to change her mind then and laid a hand on his arm to stop him for a moment. She said very softly, "You asked for information on Dani but not how to find her. Does that mean you know where she is? Can you tell me?"

Daniel said gently, "I think I know but it's up to her to decide to tell you where she is."

The woman nodded, seeming to have expected that answer. "When you see her, tell her Malva says thanks for all the presents she's sent me over the years. There's never much information on the card and never any way to tell her thanks. She's still my girl. You tell her that."

Daniel agreed but his thoughts were turned inward now. He drove to the store on automatic pilot, his mind back in the foster homes where he had seen what happened to the Dani's of this world, no matter how you spelled it. 


	3. Chapter 3

When Daniel returned to Colorado, he justified postponing his first meeting with his daughter by telling himself he needed more information. He needed to know what had happened between the time she ran away from her cousin's Sevierville home and her entry into the undergraduate program at the University of Chicago. He also needed to face his friends and make them aware of the rumors and, if he could summon the courage, they ought to know what he knew about who was behind them. Jack had kept his Colorado home and would be in town the following weekend. He'd talk to his possibly soon-to-be-ex friends when they all gathered then. 

To satisfy his need for more information, he actually opened up the Yellow Pages to detective agencies, feeling like someone in a bad black and white movie out of the thirties. His fancy was caught by the Gillford Agency whose ad said "Investigation beyond infidelity." The first appointment he could get was a week from Monday. He was delighted to have it put off in a way that allowed him to tell himself that he was facing up to things but yet gave him some more time to deal with his turbulent emotions. The truth was that he feared the eventual encounter with Deeje more than he had ever feared anything in his entire life.

Daniel was grateful that this time Teal'c wasn't available when they all got together at Jack's. It seemed like a discussion better held with just the affected parties. Sam and Jack were sitting on the couch and he was at a 45 degree angle to them, in an armchair. Their attention was on the DVD for a dark comedy, "The Upside of Anger." Daniel was watching them, wondering if he'd ever have a chance to sit and watch them like this again once they heard the truth. Sam was laughing so hard she fell over against Jack and was pounding his arm. "Sam, it's funny, but is it that funny?" Jack asked, starting to laugh at Sam more than at the DVD.

"Oh … my … God," she gasped. "Did you hear what Kevin Costner just said to her."

"Yeah. But in a slightly less funny universe, I suspect," Jack answered, chortling. Jack looked over at Daniel then and said, "Daniel, you seem to be watching a completely different movie from us, like maybe 'Saving Private Ryan.' Why the long face?"

Daniel shrugged, trying to make light of things. He should at least wait until the movie was over. "I guess I have trouble laughing at this poor woman whose husband took off without even a farewell leaving her with four kids which she copes with by drinking her head off and fooling around with her alcoholic neighbor."

"When you put it that way," Jack said, "I guess Sam's one sick puppy."

Sam punched him lightly. "You laughed your ass off when he asked her if she wanted a drink and she said, 'Do you know me?'"

Jack was still watching Daniel's face closely. For reasons Daniel had never been able to understand, Jack didn't want people to know that he was a very, very bright, astute man. That astuteness was showing now. Jack clicked the DVD off. "What is it Daniel? Really."

Sam was looking at Jack with some surprise. Despite the fact that she certainly had a reputation for being smarter and more sensitive than Jack, there were times she just didn't seem to want to know what he was really feeling. He had thought for years she didn't want to know what was going on inside his head because she was afraid of what it might be. Maybe he hadn't concealed his feelings quite as well as he had hoped.  
"All right, Jack, you are right. Something is very wrong but it's really, really awkward to talk about," Daniel said, not meeting either of their eyes.

"What? You got someone pregnant?" Jack quipped, thinking he was making a joke and lightening things up.

Daniel looked at him then, his face full of pain, and said, "I don't want to talk about that yet." Sam looked confused, unable to process what she was hearing, but there was instant sympathy in Jack's brown eyes and the sarcasm and wise guy expression fell away. "What we have to talk about first is what's going on now," Daniel continued. "There's a rumor going around the base. At first people didn't take it seriously but they're starting to. They're saying," Daniel said and ground to a halt.

"They're saying…" Jack repeated encouragingly.

Daniel blurted out in a rush, "They're saying you and Sam and I having been having three-way sex for years."

Jack blinked and fell back on, "Ya think?"

Then Sam shocked both of them by starting to laugh. At first it was more like a chuckle but it soon segued into even more hysterical laughter than "The Upside of Anger" had been sparking. "Sam?" Jack said, sounding concerned. "I don't really see the funny side."

Sam gradually got control and said, "Look, I'm not worried about the rumor because there isn't a shred of actual evidence. We didn't have sex three-way," she snorted, "or two-way. It'll die down in the face of that."

Daniel said, definitely puzzled, "That doesn't explain the laughter."

Sam closed her eyes for a moment. "Yeah, right, it doesn't. I was laughing because you two are the most clueless humans, possibly on the face of the planet, at picking up signals that women are interested in you. The three-way thing would be more credible involving Bigfoot, Superman, and a nun."

Jack and Daniel were both stunned by this assessment. Jack picked up the conversational reins first. "Sam, what the hell are you saying?"

Sam just shook her head. "Let's just say that if I ever decide to engage in three-way sex, I won't wait for you guys to call me. I'll call you first."

This atypical remark, not even unaccompanied by the sort of blushing shyness Sam would usually bring to such a conversation, did nothing to move the two men out of their stunned condition. Sam took action then to prod Daniel. "Okay, Daniel, this is actually upsetting to some extent and certainly nothing any of us wanted but it doesn't really explain the 'I don't want to talk about that yet' of a moment ago. What else is there?"

Daniel sighed. "Here we go," he thought. "Okay," he said. "I'm pretty sure I know who's behind the rumor. You guys are being hurt as a side effect of someone going after me."

"Yeah, right, Daniel," Jack snorted, the opportunity for sarcasm being more than he could resist. "You must have returned a library book late or something."

"Sometimes you need to know when to turn off the jokes," Sam said, surprising Daniel by being willing to defend him when it required criticizing Jack.

"When I was working on my second Ph.D. at the University of Chicago," Daniel said, "a professor took several of us to Tennessee for a few days to help environmental activists look fo additional Indian burial sites to block a TVA project and I met a girl, May. We knew each other for less than two days and we were together just once. She was really something special in my life, the first person since my parents died who really listened to me, who didn't think I was some sort of weird, child prodigy geek -- you know 21 and aleady on his second Ph.D.."

Jack said, quietly, "I notice you don't describe it as a one night stand." He wasn't being a smart aleck. He was pointing out the deep feeling they could all hear in Daniel's voice.

"It was supposed to be the beginning of a life together but I lost her address. The first thing I did when I got home was to put my jeans in the wash and seconds after it was too late I realized that was where it was, in the jeans pocket. I spent hours trying to make sense out of what was left but it was hopeless. I didn't have a phone number for her – it's a long story why there wasn't one. But there I was, no way to contact her. She had my number and SHE didn't call me. Of course, I didn't have an answering machine and I basically just slept there. I was at the library or in class. My horrid roommate was on the phone all the time. But she didn't write either. Shortly before I got rid of that loser roommate fully two long years later, I found out that he had more than once grabbed a piece of my mail when he needed something to write a note on or mop up something he spilled. I never even knew about whatever that piece of mail was. At the time, though, I just thought that May wasn't really as interested in me as I had believed. As time went by, it was harder and harder to believe that she would be any different from everyone else."

"About 11 years later I got hauled into court to pay child support for her daughter. May was dead and her grandfather, who was raising the child, was about as ugly to me as anyone has ever been in my entire life. I reacted defensively and insisted on a blood test which just made the man madder. He wanted the money for the girl but he didn't want me to have anything to do with her. The court talked to her and she confirmed that she didn't want to know me or live with me. Her grandfather wouldn't let me see her. So I started paying child support and got a handful of very unsatisfying letters from her dripping with hostility. Looking back on it, I'm appalled that I didn't try harder. I was the adult. I should have been able to deal with rejection better."

Jack said, "Not that this is all about me, but why didn't you ever tell Sam or me about her?"

"I found out about her the first year I was in SG-1. It was pretty personal and I didn't know any of you that well. And by the time I did, I had pretty much opted out of her life and I was ashamed. I didn't think you'd understand. Here you lost Charlie and Teal'c was separated from Rylac while I had a child just a few hundred miles away that I just walked away from."

Jack shrugged but Sam looked hurt. Jack then asked a curiously pragmatic question, "What happened with the child support while you were ascended?"

Daniel welcomed an easy to answer question. "I was afraid that something would happen to me and interrupt the payments so I set up a trust and arranged for the money to be paid out of the trust, no matter what happened to me."

Sam was clearly impatient with this discussion of logistics. "Daniel," Sam said, softly, "you obviously think this is something to be deeply ashamed of. I agree that you could have done better but facing that sort of rejection, it's easy to understand why you backed off."

Daniel looked at her thinking, "If you only knew," but merely said, "I've had enough practice dealing with rejection, you'd think I'd get better at it."

"So," Jack said getting back to the original topic, "you think your daughter is out to get you? How in the world would she be able to start a rumor at the SGC?"

"She's here. That's how," Daniel stated simply.

"Wait a minute. This is a joke? You're putting us on, right?" Sam asked, uncertainly. She too had teen years of being hideously teased and this final detail was just too much.

"Sam, honestly," said Jack, uncharacteristically being the one taking the sensitivity high ground.

Sam blushed and stammered out, "I'm sorry, Daniel. It's just too much to take in. Who is she anyway?"

"Deeje Cox. Captain D.J. Cox of SG-24," Daniel answered.

"Absolutely not," Jack said, vehemently. "No way. You must have your facts wrong."

Sam and Daniel both looked at him in surprise. "You know her?" they chorused.

Jack looked very tired and took a moment to answer. "I know OF her, okay." He hesitated again. " I met her briefly once. Deeje was in black ops. She served under a good friend of mine in a real dicey situation in the Middle East. She was really good at her job and pulled off a near miracle on her last mission with him including saving his life. But she got badly hurt. That got her out of black ops and back here," Jack said, reciting the facts flatly. "She's brilliant – she's your daughter in that sense Daniel -- but I just can't imagine you having a daughter who's," Jack paused, searching for the least hurtful way to put it.

Daniel finished, "A raptor?"

"You've heard her rep, then," Jack observed. "I cannot, WILL not, believe she's your daughter. But suppose for a minute she is, is there more to her hating you than what you've said so far? I mean it doesn't seem like enough for someone to organize their entire life around getting even with you." Sam and Daniel were looking at him with a "What do you mean expression" on their faces. Jack clarified, "I mean getting into the Air Force and getting herself here, although I suppose that could be a happy accident."

"The evidence is pretty hard to refute," Daniel said. "I don't know why you're so vehement about this but accept it, Jack. She's my daughter. As to what else I did, I went to Tennessee and checked into it last week. I thought she was happily living with family. It turns out that after her grandfather died, she was first parked with someone who blew themselves up in their meth lab, then a cousin who tried to molest her, maybe did molest her, and then she ran off and I don't know what happened to her for two years. The cousin in question just kept taking the checks and having his own daughter pose as mine when I called. So she had a dreadful childhood and I was absent the whole time."

"Even though you think your daughter's at Cheyenne Mountain," Jack said, still sounding unconvinced, "how do you know she planted the rumor?"

Daniel proceeded to lay out the entire story, detailing all the things he knew for sure and those he suspected. Sam was very quiet listening to him but it seemed to Daniel that she wanted to comfort him, to make him feel better. She just couldn't figure out how to do that. Jack was more vocal, stubbornly refusing to believe that Deeje Cox was Daniel's daughter or that if she was, she had really done anything to hurt him. He could understand Sam's dilemma but he was baffled by Jack. Both of them seemed to think that he should meet Deeje and talk to her but he refused to change his mind on that. He wasn't ready.

Eventually, a very subdued Sam left, saying one last time, "I'm here for you Daniel. Let me be there okay?"

After the door closed behind her, Daniel rose slowly and prepared to go himself. Jack said, "Before you go, Daniel, I have to ask. I'm curious about where you think Sam was coming from when you brought up the rumors? All that laughing and so on."

Daniel said in mock horror, "A feelings question, Jack? Is it really you?"

Jack said, "I'm not the only one who could stand to turn off the inappropriate humor."

"Get a grip, Jack," Daniel said, a little over Jack after he'd butted heads with him for an hour over Deeje. Then he felt bad about it, considering how much more supportive and accepting his friends had been than he had any right to expect. "Sam's frustrated because she's spent years panting after you and you've never given her any encouragement. That's my humble opinion," Daniel said, unable to avoid sounding a little bitter.

"Damn it, Daniel, I should have talked to you about this a long time ago." Jack said, leaning back and scrubbing his face with his hands for a moment. "You don't think anyone knows how you feel about her and, with the exception of me, you would be right." Daniel was gaping at him. "Close your mouth or something is likely to fly in." He picked up his beer and started picking at the label. "I think she was, hell still is a little bit any way, infatuated with me but one reason I never did anything about it because I was certainly interested in her, was that it always seemed to me that she really cared more about you and your opinion and, in general, sharing things with you. She was definitely more interested in you and your company in every way except the romantic one. I always thought that if I had made a move, say one of us had changed teams, you would always have been in the way, kind of. I'd be sharing her with you and I'm kind of a selfish guy when it comes to being involved with someone. In MY humble opinion, maybe on some level she's in love with you and doesn't understand herself well enough to know it."

"You are a real fool, Jack," Daniel stated with a great deal of affection. "You should have made a move you know. When you retire in a couple of years, if you stick to the plan you gave me, you'll have an opportunity again. For both your sakes, forget about me and make her happy." Daniel was surprised to realize that he meant it. He had never had anything with Sam and he never would. He wasn't giving up anything and at least he could see someone make her happy.

Daniel stood and Jack did the same. Jack put out his hand and said, "I think you're dead wrong. We'll just have to agree to disagree, okay old friend?"

Daniel smiled and pulled Jack into a quick hug. "Always," he said and went out into the night.

A few days later, as Daniel trudged up the single flight of stairs to the offices of the detective agency he was considering hiring, located above a Starbucks, he wished that Harry Copperfield Dresden was real. The fictional wizard/detective seemed more like what he needed, under the circumstances, than someone who was used to catching cheating spouses in motel rooms with the wrong people. Daniel really wanted someone to tell him what was in Deeje's brain, as much as what had happened to her, but he was going to have settle for the latter.

Nothing in the experience meshed with what Humphrey Bogart had led him to expect about detective agencies. The door didn't have a frosted glass pane in it through which to glimpse a seated man in a fedora and suspenders smoking a cigar. Instead it was your typical featureless internal door with a small plate that said "Gillford Agency." The receptionist wasn't wearing pumps, shoulder pads, Joan Crawford hair, and bright red lipstick. In fact, the role was filled by a young man with spiked bleached blonde hair complete with dark roots and piercing in his ears, nose, and an eyebrow. The hair and piercing warred with his selected fashion statement of a pair of Dockers and a polo shirt with a Tommy Hillfinger logo. As the man looked up from the copy of "Childbirth for Dummies," Daniel was left reassured that he had not wandered into cinema noire but unsure as to what he had wandered into instead.

The receptionist asked coolly. "May I assist you?" For unknown reasons, he had affected a British accent that Daniel, as a linguist, could immediately identify as phony.

"You having a baby?" Daniel asked, tempted to think that this was perhaps a portal to another dimension based on this watchdog stationed out front and also a little dismayed that this fellow was potentially contributing to the gene pool. He chided himself for giving in to stereotypes and waited for the response.

"No. I just think it's funny," the receptionist said, forgetting to be aloof and lapsing very briefly into an American accent before he caught himself on the word funny. "Did you have an appointment?" he asked, returning to his assumed London roots.

Daniel nodded and the young man glanced at a screen on his computer and then immediately ushered Daniel back, gesturing into the office with a hand whose nails were decorated with chipped black nail polish. Daniel found himself in front of a desk occupied by a no-nonsense looking woman with short grey hair that was chopped off rather than styled, wearing glasses with ugly, black plastic frames and a shapeless polyester pants suit that cried out "I qualify for the senior discount." As he bemusedly watched the receptionist leave, she said, dismissively, "He's my nephew. He really wants to be Spike, you know the vampire on Buffy, but his mother buys his clothes." She then extended a hand and gave him a brisk, power shake, saying, "I'm Bertie Audubon and you, of course, are Dr. Daniel Jackson." She looked at him a trifle impatiently and said, "You do know what a chair is for don't you?"

"Okay," Daniel thought, "weird receptionist and now this." Still he sat. Where else was he going to go at this point? The woman was as fascinating in her own way as the receptionist. He actually thought he glimpsed a hint of dark roots in her hair and her complexion seemed on the dewy side for the age suggested by the hair and the clothes. "Would someone deliberately die their hair and frump themselves up?" Daniel wondered.

"You obviously have a problem. I'm not here to investigate your sexual partners for you although," she looked at him critically but without rancor, "I'm not at all sure you have any. Do you have any other problems?"

"My God," Daniel thought, "why do I find myself liking this woman?" Aloud, he said, "I have an illegitimate daughter whom I have never met. I paid child support while she was growing up and lately I found out that she ran away from the relatives she was living with but they concealed this from me and continued to cash the checks."

Daniel thought the woman was going to come across the desk at him. "And you want your money back?" Bertie asked him in a very unfriendly tone.

Daniel raised a hand as if to fend off a blow, "I don't give a damn about the money. I want to know what happened to her after she ran away. I want to understand what happened so I can understand her. She hates me and I have to know all of it. I have to understand my own … my own sins."

Bertie's face changed and she looked almost friendly. "I'll do it if you can stand to have me wait two weeks before I start. I've got several other cases and limited resources, in more ways than one." She jerked her head toward the outer office.

Daniel wanted to know the truth but yet he was afraid of it. A two week delay was something of a reprieve and he said, "As long as it won't be any longer than that."

She raised her eyebrow. "If I tell you something, that's what happens." Daniel tried to looked appropriately chastened. "Not to worry. If anyone can find out what happened it'll be me. It won't be cheap." She took a sheet of paper from a drawer and slid it across to Daniel. "Here's my rate schedule. Can you handle it?" When Daniel nodded, she said, "You'll have weekly reports and invoices. You'll hear from us more often if we find anything really significant."

After Daniel gave Bertie all the information he had, they shook hands again and Daniel left the building confident that he would know enough when Bertie Audubon finished to determine whether he even had a right to prevent Deeje from ruining his life.


	4. Chapter 4

Daniel was really having a hard time concentrating. Knowing that Deeje was loose out there, trying to find ways to make his life miserable, made his back crawl between his shoulder blades like someone was going to come up behind him and knife him. He found himself straining to overhear the conversations around him and Ian was getting tired of being asked if he had heard any more rumors. He enlisted Sam's help to find out about Deeje although, since she was linked with him in the well-known SG-1 legend as well as the current rumors, she had to troll for information subtly just as he did, at least from anyone likely to be good friends with Deeje. 

While he wasn't ready to meet Deeje yet, he was fascinated with her and little by little, he got closer to stalking her. He got the detective agency to give him Deeje's home address and he drove through the neighborhood a few times. He found out where her office was in Cheyenne Mountain and started making a point of being aware of SG-24's schedule off-world. He created a whole elaborate scenario that gave him a good excuse to be going down that particular corridor. As the program had expanded with involvement from other nations, office space was at a premium and all the more junior staff with offices shared them with at least 2 other office mates. If one of her office mates was on base and she wasn't, he might just find the office open and empty long enough to look around. It was a stupid plan. It seemed to be very unlikely that someone could share an office with her and not know that she hated him. His presence in the office would have to be reported to her if he was caught but he couldn't help himself.

The fourth time he went down the corridor, he hit pay dirt. The door was open, the lights were on, and the office was vacant. The corridor was empty and he decided to regard that as a sign. He took a deep breath and ducked inside. There were three desks and fortunately each had a nameplate resting on top. All belonged to military officers and so there was no room for any messiness but it seemed that, within those parameters, Deeje's was the least tidy. Was it really or was he just hoping for something beyond her academic credentials that resembled him?

There were two posters taped to the side of the desk. One showed the Lady Vols with a woman named Pat Summit Head in front and the other was someone named Peyton Manning tricked out as a football player. There was a Sunday bulletin from Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church partially tucked in a manual lying on the desk. Unreasonably, he felt a little rejected to discover that she was apparently a sports fan and a churchgoer, yet another gulf between them.

On top of the desk, there were four framed pictures. As he moved around to look at them, he knocked one over and froze at the small sound he made. Nothing came of it and he relaxed. He picked up the picture of the sweet girl he had known for a few hours in Tennessee. He had thought he had forgotten her face but, when he saw her captured at close to the age she had been when he had kissed her and almost drowned in her big brown eyes, memories he thought he had lost surfaced. He shook himself realizing that he didn't have time to walk down memory lane while standing in an office where he didn't have any good reason to be. He quickly looked at the other pictures. One was a grim looking older man and his equally grim looking wife. The grandparents he guessed. He smiled when he got a good look at the third picture. It was his friend, Malva. Deeje's kindness to the old woman and the proud display of her picture even though she looked as eccentric in the frame as she did in person were the only evidence he had yet seen that there was anything likable about the daughter he didn't know. When he restored the picture he had knocked over to a standing position, he got a real shock. It showed an unfamiliar colonel, a woman in uniform, her hat pulled down so that only her chin was visible, and standing between them, his arm around both, but his gaze fixed intently on the woman was Jack O'Neill.

He heard footsteps in the corridor and quickly moved out of direct line of sight of the door. If it was one of her office mates, there was no help for it but, he hoped, if someone was just passing by, there was no need for them to see him. His mouth was dry and he felt like he was trying to steal jewels or something. It was really more than ridiculous that a man should have to feel like a burglar to visit his own daughter's office, but that was his fault in the final analysis. The footsteps stopped next to the door and he had to deliberately force himself not to squeeze his eyes shut and mutter, "Please no," over and over again. It wouldn't do for her office mates to find him acting like a guilty second grader. He did hold his breath and then let it out in a whoosh as the footsteps resumed and faded off in the distance. He would be a fool if he stayed there one second longer. He immediately eased out the door and walked rapidly away.

He was really bothered by the picture of Jack on Deeje's desk. He told himself that he didn't know the woman in the picture was Deeje. It could have been almost anyone, at least anyone who was female, about 5'10" and not dark skinned. Deeje could have the picture because of a friendship with the other man or with the woman and never have met Jack. That just seemed quite improbable. Why had Jack defended her so vigorously? Daniel kept coming to the conclusion that Jack had had more than some chance encounter with her that he implied. Not with that expression on his face. It made no sense that he had deliberately misled Daniel. Daniel thought about calling Jack but then decided he needed the benefit of body language and any other telltale signs when he confronted him with his discovery. As impatient as he was, it would have to wait until the next time he got together with Jack.

Daniel began to develop a burning desire to know what Deeje really looked like. Malva had said she had his eyes and his mouth. For her sake, he hoped she didn't look like him. It would be to her benefit if she had inherited her looks from her pretty mother whose shy smile was beginning to haunt his dreams. Finally he contrived to be in the command center above the gate when SG-24 returned from a mission. They came through in rough condition. Two soldiers supported a third who had a hasty field bandage around his head, seeping blood. Another soldier, a woman, was limping and it looked like she had a wound in her leg but she was managing unaided. The fifth team member looked battered but unwounded and had his weapon out as did the limping woman. All five were spattered with mud. Was Deeje the limping woman or the woman helping to support her colleague? He caught a look at the sleeve of the lamed soldier and saw that she was a noncommissioned officer. Through process of elimination, his daughter was the tall woman supporting the wounded comrade.

Now that he knew he was looking at his daughter, it was hard to keep his feelings off his face. Fortunately the condition of the team had everyone looking a little upset so his lack of calm was not noticeable. Deeje had on a hat and, like in the picture, it was jammed down on her head. At this angle, if she didn't look up, he would never see the face hidden by the bill of the cap. She never looked up. Her attention stayed focused on the wounded man. Despite the medics who came flooding in with a stretcher, she never left his side. He clung to her hand and the team formed around their wounded as they went to the infirmary.

He went straight to Sam's office. He did not need to be alone. She was deeply involved in some piece of alien apparatus and greeted him rather perfunctorily. "You're busy," he said, disappointed but too proud to demand that she pay attention to him. "I'll talk to you later."

He was almost out the door when he heard her come up rapidly behind him and felt her touch him on the back. "Daniel, I'm sorry," she said and, turning around, he could see that she did look it. "You look pretty rough. Come on back in." She reached behind him, closed the door, and locked it.

"You didn't need to do that," Daniel protested, but he was gratified that it was important to her that they not be interrupted.

"Let's sit down," she said and they moved to the corner with her desk and a visitor's chair. "Okay, spill."

"I saw Deeje from the control room when she came through the gate. I really couldn't tell what she looked like, her cap jammed down the way it was, but I saw her," Daniel had almost the same wonder in his voice that a father does seeing his newborn baby for the first time. He looked down and saw that his hands were trembling. Sam noticed it too and captured them in her own.

"Oh, Daniel, are you sure you're doing the right thing, waiting to meet her, to talk to her?" Sam searched his face as if the answer would be written there somewhere.

"I don't know Sam. It's just, every day she becomes more real to me. Every day it matters more and more to me that somehow I can get her to forgive me and I don't even know the full dimensions yet of what it is that I need to have forgiven. I'm a middle aged man and this is probably the only child I'll ever have. I'm scared to death of meeting her." Daniel wound to a stop and gripped Sam's hands.

They sat there for a long time, Daniel gradually relaxing his grip on Sam's hands. He sighed deeply and realized he didn't want to keep his questions about the picture bottled up any longer either. "There's something else, Sam, really strange. I saw something when I went into her office the other day when no one was around."

"Daniel, that was crazy. Maybe you want to trigger a meeting subconsciously," she said speculatively.

"Oh for God sake, Sam," he exploded, pulling his hands away from her. "Don't practice psychiatry without a license. Although you probably are quite an expert on people not coming to grips with their subconscious desires."

Sam jerked back as if he had slapped her and he had, verbally anyway. "Where the hell is that coming from, Daniel Jackson?" she demanded.

He stood up and threw his hands in the air. "I think it's pretty funny that you lay such an indictment on Jack and me for being clueless about women being interested in us when you've running around for the better part of what, 15 years, carrying a torch for Jack O'Neill and unable to either admit it sufficiently to yourself that you act on it and/or figure out that he's interested in you. And now he's got God knows what going on with my daughter, MY daughter, who's decades younger than he is."

Daniel's words hung in the air and he seemed to listen to them now as if someone else had spoken them and he was hearing them for the first time. Was this what a decade of suppressing your feelings did? You suddenly went postal on your friends? "Oh, Sam," he said, instantly contrite. "Please forgive me. You didn't deserve that. I'm just really upset. Lately I've been dreaming about May every night. I've been looking at my life and I feel like one of those major 'road not taken' points was reached when I let May slip between my fingers. If I'd stayed with her and our daughter, I wouldn't be alone now. Look, I'll just leave."

"Not so fast, buster," Sam said. "You're going to explain a couple of things. First off, where are you coming from with that stuff about me and Jack?"

"Where am I coming from?" Daniel forgot that he was supposed to be apologetic as she pushed his buttons once again. "Maybe you've forgotten laughing at us over the group sex rumor. We both know that you were alluding to the fact that you think Jack has never been able to see your interest in him."

"Do we?" she said, sounding a little dangerous.

"Yes," he said emphatically. "You're just as guilty as he is, Sam, since you could never really see that your interest was returned or act on it. I just wish the two of you would put the rest of us out of our misery, having to stand around and hope that you'll…"

"Finish the sentence, Daniel," she commanded.

"Leave it alone, Sam. I should have left when I said I was going to."

He started to move toward the door but she stood in front of him, physically blocking his progress. "Okay, Daniel, I'll let that part go but I want an explanation of that crack about Jack and your daughter."

Daniel was feeling like a complete jerk for that slip. He had no real idea what the picture meant and the implication that Jack was having some sort of a relationship with his daughter, decades younger and probably in a position vis a vis Jack in the chain of command such that any relationship was against some sort of regulations, had come out of his mouth without ever having been a conscious thought in his head first. "Oh, I was just aggravated with him the other night, the way he kept saying she wasn't my daughter or if she was, she wasn't responsible for the rumor. It gave me some wild hair idea that he somehow knows her or something."

Sam drew herself up and got right in his face. "Look here, Daniel, you've got your troubles right now and I'm trying to make allowances, but you will not attack Jack to me -- ever. You will not make wild accusations about him like that to me -- ever. My feelings about him are much more complicated than the simple scenario that you have worked out in your pointy little head but whatever they are, I WILL NOT TOLERATE ANY MORE OF THIS CRAP."

He was looking into her blue eyes and he had never seen anything like the flames in their depths. That was when he went crazy. She was so angry with him and he had revealed so much more than he intended to, he might already have destroyed their friendship. He might as well go for broke. He reached out, ran a hand into her hair and gripped the back of her head. With his other arm, he pulled her against him and then he brought his mouth down on hers. It started out very hard but he eased up immediately and put everything he had learned about kissing from every woman he had ever known into that kiss. She didn't kiss him back but she didn't stiffen. She just let it happen, even to his tongue plunging into her mouth. When he finally let go of her, she slapped him hard and said, "That wasn't a kiss. That was some sort of a statement, a salvo fired in some battle you're having with Jack. All these years and you're still clueless. Get out."

Daniel got back to his office somehow and sat numbly in his chair, holding his hand to his stinging cheek. He thought then of his daughter's plot to get even with him. Maybe she hadn't done anything for the past week or so because they had now entered the phase where he took over the destruction directly through his reactions to what Deeje had already set in motion.


	5. Chapter 5

In the days immediately after his fight with Sam, Daniel was virtually worthless at his job. He couldn't concentrate and he knew he couldn't, so he really didn't try. Instead he thought about Deeje and made lists of things to investigate. He wrote letters to her and drafts of an apology speech, all of which he destroyed.

His obsessive circling around and around the same few questions had now expanded to include not just his daughter but his two best friends. Sam absolutely was not talking to him. He tried to call her and she hung up on him. He sent her e-mails, turning on return receipt after having the first couple ignored, to have it confirmed that they were deleted without being read. He thought about going to her office but the memory of that slap made him skirt any potentially explosive in-person confrontation. The overwhelming emotion he had taken away from the encounter was humiliation. She had hurt him so many ways without intending to over the years but she had never humiliated him before and he didn't want to give her another opportunity. After a couple of days of the silent treatment, he was angry and he clung to that. It was easier to deal with than the sick feeling of humiliation that brought back young Danny Jackson from some hidden corner of his mind.

Jack was a huge problem he couldn't solve. He felt betrayed but, at the same time, he also felt disloyal. He kept telling himself that Jack would have an explanation and then that he was a gullible fool because there was no conceivable acceptable explanation. Finally, he called Jack in DC.

"Daniel," Jack said, sounding a little less than thrilled to hear from him or so it seemed to Daniel, "this is a surprise. Is everything all right? Everybody okay?"

"Why wouldn't we be?" Daniel asked, suspiciously.

"For God's sake, Daniel," Jack said, sounding exasperated now. "You never call me in Washington. It's a logical assumption." He spoke briefly to someone in the background.

"If you're busy.." Daniel said, now wanting just to end the conversation and sorry that he had given in to his anxieties and called.

"No. Someone was just in my office but we had finished up. So what's on your mind?"

"I was wondering when you'd be in Colorado next and if we could set aside some time to talk, just the two of us," Daniel requested.

"I guess Sam didn't tell you that we talked yesterday and discussed everybody getting together this Saturday," Jack said.

"Sam isn't talking to me so I have no idea what she discussed with you. In any case, I really need an opportunity for the two of us to talk, alone," Daniel explained, testily. Jack really wasn't listening to him.

"Why isn't Sam talking to you?" Jack asked but he didn't sound that curious. Daniel was immediately convinced that Sam had already told him her side of it but Jack was playing dumb.

"Believe whatever you want to, Jack. And, in case you think that's what I want to talk about, it isn't. Unless you have a problem, I'll be by your place Saturday morning around 10:00." Daniel was through with this conversation.

"Fine, Daniel, fine," Jack acquiesced and they exchanged curt goodbyes and hung up.

Daniel stood looking at the phone for a few minutes after he hung up. He desperately needed someone to talk to but his last friend, Teal'c, was off-world. He also felt it was unfair to put Teal'c in the middle. Not only unfair but stupid. That was what had precipitated the blow up with Sam. "There are your real friends," he thought, "and then there are the people who have to pretend they are your friends because you're paying them money" and he went to see Bertie Audubon.

That day, Bertie's nephew and receptionist was channeling Spike AFTER Spike got a soul and greeted him much more warmly. He showed Daniel back to Bertie's office immediately. This was the third time Daniel had been to see her and there was an actual hint of friendliness in her brisk tone. He collapsed in a chair facing her across her cluttered desk and buried his head in his hands. A silence stretched out but it wasn't uncomfortable.

After a while, he heard Bertie get up, circle her desk, and come around to sit next to him. She went to lean over him just as he decided he was acting like an idiot and straightened up. His head collided with her jaw. Her glasses were knocked off and she yelped. They then both stood up and when Daniel went to take a step back from her, he realized he was about to step on her glasses. In seeking to avoid them, he got tangled up in his chair, and lost his balance, tottering against her. She wound up sitting in her chair with Daniel sprawled across her.

Bertie looked very startled and then she started to laugh. It was a wonderful laugh. Not musical or tinkling but a full out raucous belly laugh, complete with gasping and snorting, that was absolutely infectious. Daniel began to laugh in response and then laughed even harder when he realized what a ridiculous picture they must make. He unfolded himself from her lap and picked up her glasses. He looked quickly down through them and thought they didn't appear to make any difference in what he saw. It appeared that Bertie was wearing bogus glasses along with her bogus grey hair which now had at least an inch of dark brown roots. Not only that but he had gained some knowledge of the body under Bertie's frumpy clothes, sprawled across it as he had been. She did not have a frumpy body.

"I'm sorry for knocking your glasses off and sitting on you," Daniel said, grinning. He wasn't really very sorry at all. It had been quite a revealing experience. It was also the first time he had laughed in a couple of weeks.

"Don't be. You looked like a dead seal I once saw washed up on the beach at Malibu," she said. "It was really cute if you could ignore the fact that it was dead."

Daniel didn't think that was a compliment but he couldn't be sure. "I'm just incredibly discouraged, Bertie, and needed someone to talk to. To be honest with you, this business with Deeje has now cost me one, if not two of my three best friends." He spared a brief thought pitying thought for himself that he had had such a pitifully small number of friends to begin with. "I'm a little afraid to talk to the third one for fear I'll end up with no friends at all." He then served her up the sort of bluntness she typically used on him. "I figured you're not really my friend, just some one who listens to me because I pay her money. Unless I quit paying you, we're in good shape."

"You really are a mess aren't you?" she observed. "I bet all you've ingested in the last two days are pieces of cold pizza left over from a pie you ordered the night before last and a lot of coffee. You looked reasonably buff when you came here the first time but you've started loosing it. Too discouraged even to keep up your exercise routine." She shook her head and waggled a finger at him. "World's full of ugly men. The halfway decent looking ones have to preserve themselves. Sort as if they were national landmarks." She scooped up a manila envelope off her desk and said, "It's the end of the day. I've got your first report here. I don't have any more appointments and you don't have a life so clearly you're not busy. You're coming upstairs to my apartment with me. We'll go over your report and I'm going to put some food in you." She headed for the door, saying, "I'm not carrying you up there so get a move on it." Daniel followed her, noticing for the first time that her baggy pants couldn't completely conceal the fact that she had a rather lovely backside. What in the world was going on with this woman? 

Her apartment was almost like home. There were books everywhere and all sorts of interesting artifacts stuck anywhere there was a surface without a competing stack of books. She handed him the report, saying, "Have a seat and scan that while I start something cooking and then we can go over any questions you might have."

He dropped on a comfortable Victorian sofa that had aged gracefully and pulled out several typed pages and a glossy photo. The photo showed a girl in her early teens with long light brown hair and his eyes standing next to a nun and a man in a suit. He studied her photo hungrily, trying to age her 11 years to imagine how she would look now. Her face was cynical and world weary at 15. From that respect she already looked even older than her chronological age today.

The report provided a lot of detail about Deeje's time at Covenant House in Chicago. Covenant House was a national Catholic charity that got kids off the street. Deeje had been the kind of success story of which any charity could be proud. They had taken her in and within five months she had passed her GED and taken the SATs and ACTs, earning perfect scores in each. The only credit Covenant House took for this was getting her to take the tests. She had a genius IQ and, even while on the street had maintained an intense self-study program of her own that had equipped her with the required knowledge. Covenant House had been instrumental in getting the man in the suit, a Chicago entrepreneur who had been a street kid himself, to award her a scholarship that funded her undergraduate study at the University of Chicago. Covenant House had also gone to court with her to help her get declared an emancipated minor.

There was considerably less to report about what she had been doing prior to Covenant House. Several of the nuns and lay workers had been there 11 years before and they all definitely remembered Deeje. They all also refused to divulge anything they knew about her past. The agency had started tracking down other Covenant House alumni from the period in hopes that one of them would talk.

Bertie reappeared from the kitchen and handed him a beer and then a glass. "No need to let civilization go completely down the drain," was her comment to accompany the glass.

"Bertie, I know you don't investigate cheating spouses or significant others but have to ask you to do something close to that with respect to Deeje." She looked like she was about to protest. "Hear me out. I've got a very close friend who's even older than I am. He denies knowing my daughter but I've seen a picture of him with her that suggests otherwise. I'm floored that he would lie to me about it. I'm going to confront him Saturday morning but I'm not confidant I'll get the truth. When we've talked earlier, you promised me that this was all confidential. Can I count on that?"

"A court of law wouldn't ordinarily see it that way," Bertie said, "but I happen to have a law degree stuck in a drawer. We'll add a dollar to your invoice as my retainer."

"Okay then. His name is Jack O'Neill and here's his address," Daniel said extending a piece of paper to her.

"Not THE Jack O'Neill? The head of.." she said, widening her eyes.

Daniel cut her off. "Yeah him." He looked at her speculatively and then leaned over and removed her glasses. "These are just plain glass and your hair isn't naturally gray."

She snatched the glasses back and jammed them on her face. "I dyed it for a particular job." Then she realized she had answered him as if he had a right to ask, "And that would be your business because?"

"Because you really intrigue me and I can't figure out why you want to make yourself look older and less attractive than you really are," Daniel said, moving closer to her and taking the glasses off again. "It isn't working by the way," he added, dropping the glasses on the table and cupping the soft skin of her cheek in his hand.

A brief look of panic flashed across her face and she said, "I'm immune to being romanced. I saw way too many cheating men in the days before I started refusing those cases." She pulled his hand down and tried to reach for her glasses.

He captured it and said, "Bertie, I'm not cheating on anyone. There isn't a soul who cares what I do. I've moped around thinking I was in love with someone for about 12 years but I'm beginning to think I didn't know her at all. She certainly doesn't care what I do. I'm not trying to get you in bed and I'm not trying to start a serious relationship but I feel very, very alone and right now I can't think of anything I'd rather do more than kiss you for a few minutes. What do you think?" It was a fine line between needy and being appealing "little boy lost." If Daniel had ever tried to deliberately work it, he probably would have failed but it was completely unconscious and almost impossible for most women to resist. Bertie was not the first to look in those wonderful blue eyes and drown.

"Hell, there isn't anything on television except WW Smackdown," she said and regained a sense of control by being the one to initiate the first kiss. Her mouth was generous with full lips like his own and she tasted really good. The first kiss was exploratory with the only contact being their mouths. Then he moaned and pulled her very nice body with its lovely, full bosom against him and he plundered her mouth in serious. It would have been like making out in high school, if Daniel not been way young and lacking in the self-confidence to actually take anybody out, much less make out with them at the time.

He kept his promise and stopped after about five minutes. She rose as if they had spent the last five minutes playing Parcheesi. They had a delicious dinner together and he found that she was well read and had interesting things to say as well as an ability to listen. It was as if the scene on the couch had never happened except that when he got ready to go, he turned at the door, embraced her and pulled her around so that she was pressed between him and the wall next to the door. He gave her a very thorough kiss with their bodies full length against each other, his quickly demonstrating to her just how much he appreciated her. "Thanks for everything," he said huskily and left.

Friday, Daniel went on-line and looked at the flights in from DC. He thought he remembered the time Jack had once remarked he typically left and it looked like Jack should be at his house no later than 10:30 that night, provided things were reasonably on schedule. He had arranged to talk with Jack the next morning but he was out of patience and didn't want to spend another night having trouble sleeping wondering about Jack. Of course there would still be Deeje and Sam chasing each other in his head but maybe he could get a modicum more rest.

He tried calling but the phone was busy so, in the end, he just got in the car and drove there. It was raining which matched his mood perfectly. By the time he arrived, it was slashing down in torrents. He sat in the car for a moment, considered whether it was worth getting bone chilling wet in near freezing weather to go into a man's house and possibly put paid to a very long friendship. He fixated briefly on the fact that he was so poorly organized that there probably wasn't even an umbrella in the damn car. He rooted around making sure and extricated a sorry specimen from under the seat at last. It had two broken spokes and there was a big chunk out of the plastic in the handle. When he pushed the car door open and deployed the umbrella, something powdery fell on his face. With the way the rain was pouring down, he quickly decided that despite its flaws, this little umbrella was his friend.

He started to go to the front door but there was a huge puddle at the beginning of the sidewalk to the front which would have required squishing through a lot of wet grass to circumvent. The backdoor wasn't that much further and he didn't see a puddle so he headed that way, noticing as he went that all the blinds on the front of the house were uncharacteristically drawn. As he passed the kitchen window at the side of the house, he heard raised voices. He didn't really want to charge in while Jack was in the middle of something. He noticed that the curtains had probably been hurried pulled together and one had caught on something. A small triangle of visibility remained. Feeling like a peeping Tom, Daniel leaned over and peered in the window.

Jack and a woman with her back to him were squared off against each other. He couldn't understand what either was saying over the noise of the storm. Jack yelled something at her and she turned her back on him and hugged herself while he kept yelling. Daniel knew that face. It was his daughter. The cynicism of 15 was gone, replaced by hurt and loss and tears rolling down her cheeks. When Jack finished, she straightened and dashed the tears from her face. She wheeled and slapped him hard across the face. They stared at each other for a moment and then she ran from the room.

The back door crashed open. Daniel froze. Was he going meet his daughter for the first time when she encountered him peering at her like voyeur? The woman that came dashing out the door didn't run back around the house. She went straight across the backyard and cut through to the street beyond. Daniel realized she had parked where her visit to Jack wouldn't be noticed.

Daniel was now completely soaked. There was no way he could go to Jack's door in this condition. Jack would be a fool if he didn't at least entertain the possibility that Daniel had been lurking outside. Daniel went back to his car and drove home, the cold water dripping down his neck and shivers racking his body, despite blasts of hot air blowing out the vents. He took a hot shower and went to bed.

The next morning, he got dressed but when it came time to go to Jack's, he stayed right where he was. What was the point? He knew for sure that Jack had been lying. He might just have a close, fatherly relationship with Deeje, it might be a military mentor/protégée thing, or he might be her lover. It didn't matter a lot to Daniel at that point. He didn't want to listen to it any more. About 10 after 10 the phone rang and he ignored it. It could be Jack and it could be someone soliciting for the FOP. It didn't much matter. He didn't have anything left to give anyone.

He stayed right where he was, drinking his coffee and making a list of worlds he could gate to and not come back from. The problem was you couldn't just waltz into the gateroom and dial out. What he needed to do was go on a legitimate mission, sneak away, get back to the gate, and go somewhere. It was a pleasant fantasy but the more he thought about it, the more he realized he was seriously considering it. 

He poured a fresh cup of coffee and raised it in the approximate direction of his daughter's neighborhood in a salute to her victory. In his head, the lines of the song "Eve of Destruction" started looping. 


	6. Chapter 6

Daniel crossed planets out and then wrote some of them back in again. After making a mess of his pad, he got more organized and created a grid on a fresh sheet of paper with the planet names down the side and columns representing things like pros, cons, and needed trade goods across the top. He kept telling himself that looking for a planet to which to run away and never come back was just an idle exercise but, as one corner of his mind knew damn well, he was being this thorough because he was really, on some level, seriously considering it.

By 11:35, he had a rather nice short list with 4 strong candidates and tucked it in his jeans pocket. He typically had great success with defining a problem very precisely and then walking away from it for at least 48 hours. When he came back, it just fell out of his mind, tied up in a neat bow. God knew, he needed something to be neat and well-defined right now.

He stood and looked around the place. He COULD clean it. He briefly entertained the thought of having Bertie over for dinner, to pay her back for her cooking for him, and tried to envision what she would think of the general mess. She would be appalled. Anyone but a fanatical slob would be appalled. Daniel wasn't so far gone into sloppy housekeeping that he didn't at least realize just how abysmal he had allowed his home environment to become. Scratch Bertie over for dinner because he couldn't bring himself to clean a place that in the deepest part of his mind he had already decided to leave forever. 

"I can't believe I'm actually thinking about this so seriously," Daniel thought, appalled at how a wild idea had become a plan while his conscious mind wasn't watching. He told himself, "Okay, so the woman you've loved for years isn't even your friend any more, the man you thought was a cross between best friend and older brother has lied to you and may be messing with your daughter, said daughter hates your guts, your career is in a precarious state, and you have one friend left who is never around. Is that any reason to run away?" It didn't sound that bad but it didn't sound that good. The happiest, most useful days of his life had been on Abydos. He could make that happen again. Even as he sold himself on the idea, honesty did force him to make one quick correction to his recitation of his dismal state. He actually had two friends because Bertie, somehow, overnight had found her way into his heart.

The doorbell rang and he must have jumped a foot. Jack may just have gotten in the car and come over to figure out why he was a no show. It would be uncharacteristically hands on care and feeding of his friends for the self-contained man Jack had become over recent years but Daniel hadn't been doing well with probability lately. He decided to assume it was Jack and not someone selling candy for their school band. He grabbed his wallet, cell, and keys but realized that he didn't have a coat. That would require him to go to the front hall. He was being ridiculous. There was no way for the caller to see him doing it. The only telltale window had its drapes drawn. He just needed to avoid being heard. "Thank heavens for the back door," he thought, shrugged his carefully retrieved coat on and he eased out it as the caller hit the doorbell for the third time.

He went silently into the alley and down to the end of the block. He was powerfully tempted to try to determine whether it had been Jack at the door but that would put him out in the open. As Jack drove away, he might well see him skulking about. And what did it matter anyway? If Jack had shown up, it was probably because he was still capable of a certain amount of guilt and shame, not because he gave a damn about Daniel. "Pity party alert," he told himself sternly.

He slipped out the cell phone and called the one person he knew wouldn't tolerate any pity party foolishness from him. "Good morning," he said sweetly as Bertie snarled something incoherent into the phone.

"It is still morning and on a SATURDAY," Bertie pointed out, far more coherent. He could hear her moving about now, and then sounds that seemed to indicate coffee preparation.

"By maybe 15 minutes. Don't you want the worm?" he asked, smiling.

"Does that mean what I think it does?" she asked, sounding very wary.

"For heaven sakes, Bertie, get your mind out of the gutter," Daniel chided. "I was referencing early birds."

"And I was thinking tequila," she retorted. "Have you ever been, in any way, described as wormlike?"

"Let's try to bring this whole thing up to a higher plain," Daniel answered, unable to repress a chuckle. "Look, I have to hide out today and thought you might like to hide out with me."

"What girl wouldn't be tempted by an offer like that?" she said dryly, "but I have to work."

"Can I help?" he asked, surprising both of them.

"You probably could," she said. "I have to go look through a bunch of dusty records. Someone's trying to find out what happened to their grandfather, a milkman, who went out for a pack of Chesterfields after listening to "The Shadow" on the radio and never came back."

"Ouch," Daniel said. "We're talking a reeeely cold trail."

Bertie said, "I tried to dissuade the granddaughter, who's rather antique herself at this point, but it's giving her great pleasure so I'm cutting her a discount." She paused, "As a client you should know this is something I am not going to do for you since you have a fine income despite the fact that you are cuter than a dead baby seal and kiss like a dream."

"Okay," Daniel said, slowly. Bertie's compliments tended to leave him confounded. "I'm afraid to go to the front of my place to get my car. The person who rang my bell five minutes ago could be sitting in their car waiting for me to show up."

"Get over yourself. Who cares enough about you to sit around in their car in this weather waiting for you to show up?" Bertie said bluntly.

"They have heaters," Daniel said weakly.

"Right. Just give it another five minutes and then march your butt around the house, get in your car, and get over here. I'm only waiting 30 minutes." She sounded very stern and then she started her wonderful laugh, cut off by the dial tone.

Daniel's cell started to ring. He almost flipped it open immediately but made himself check caller id first. It was Jack. He wasn't answering that but then he had a bad thought. "Jack is a really high muckety muck now and he's got like the CIA working for him. Maybe they could triangulate on my cell phone. I need medication," he reflected then, trying to take himself in hand. "Jack has too much integrity to use those resources to track down a friend who stood him up for coffee. Doesn't he?" He looked at the cell like it was a tarantula but it was too expensive to toss in the gutter so he jammed back in a pocket, retrieved his car, and went to Bertie's.

On the way, he thought that he might be able to use Teal'c for some misdirection. He dialed the larger of his two remaining friends immediately. "Good day, DanielJackson," said Teal'c courteously. It sounded like he was in a coffee shop.

"Hi, Teal'c," Daniel returned. "Are you going over to Jack's tonight?"

"Is there a reason I should not?" Teal'c asked.

"Huh? Look, Teal'c, I suddenly discovered that I need to … visit a sick friend who lives in Castle Rock. I was going to call Jack but I'm afraid he'd try to change my mind."

"GeneralO'Neill is very concerned about the sick," Teal'c said loyally. "He would not try to interfere."

"Whatever. Just tell him, thanks, but I can't make it. Okay? Because I'll be in Castle Rock. I'm actually leaving now. For Castle Rock." Daniel winced. He was a really bad liar. How was he going to get to another world in order to gate off it to a fresh start without telegraphing his evil intentions through general weirdness. "So, goodbye," he said, adding, before he could stop himself, "because I need to get on the road to Castle Rock."

Daniel had a marvelous afternoon with Bertie. They had only talked about her work for him long enough for him to tell her to call off investigating Jack. He already had the information. She didn't push for more details and he was grateful because he had already thought about it more than he wanted to. They actually did find a lead in the musty volumes and celebrated by buying a huge pizza with a bizarre assortment of toppings and taking it back to Bertie's. She made him laugh more than he had laughed in a long time, not just since the Deeje nightmare.

Eventually it got late and Daniel knew he needed to leave before he did something stupid. He didn't believe in casual sex. Bertie deserved better than some guy making love to her and then literally departing this world almost immediately afterwards. Her camouflage glasses and frumpy clothes told him she was even more vulnerable than the average woman, although he had not yet had an explanation of why she had assumed her protective coloring.

He was trying to force himself to stand up when she said, "Put your head in my lap." He looked at her askance but her only response was to repeat herself. Daniel shrugged and complied. She gently removed his glasses and started to massage his scalp and his neck. "Do you want to tell me from whom you're hiding and why? Or what it is that you periodically went off in a fog thinking about today?"

He caught her hands and kissed her palms. "So you think you can torture it out of me?"

"Not ready to tell me?" she said, a little sadly.

"I can't Bertie, not all of it. There's classified stuff. But I promise you, if I decide to go hide forever, I'll tell you good bye first." He craned his head back to look at her. "Since hiding forever is definitely on the list of possibilities, I can't do what I would very much like to do to you but how about another five minute kissing session. It seems to be good for at least 8 hours of significant mood enhancement." She managed to actually make him feel better well into the next day as well as very uncertain as to whether he might have gotten over Sam at some point when he wasn't looking. Maybe loving Sam had become a habit persisting after the original reason was gone. Maybe when Sam rejected and humiliated him, she had set him free. It was one more think to wonder about chasing itself around in his brain.

He spent Sunday prowling around the mall, getting inspirations for small, easily portable trade goods that could be slipped in his normal kit but give him enough lingua franca to get established in one of the destination worlds he had in mind. He sat in the Food Court and looked at the humanity flowing past him with new eyes. He was quite ready to never see some things again. In fact he started making a list of things that he would be DELIGHTED to never see again such as overweight women in spandex with midriff bearing tops, men with rude and crude slogans on their t-shirts, nine-year old girls dressed like hookers, and little boys ignoring the real world for the artificiality of Gameboys. But there were other things that became achingly beautiful when you thought you would loose them forever, even humble things like onion rings. He'd left it all behind once. Could he, should he, do it again?

Periodically, roughly at one hour intervals, Jack's name showed up on his ringing cell phone. Then about mid-afternoon, it started alternating with Teal'c's. He finally took Teal'c's call about 5:00 as he stood contemplating the choices of movies at the mall's adjoining multiplex. "DanielJackson, are you still in Castle Rock?"

Daniel said, "Castle Rock?" and then realized his mistake, "Oh, that Castle Rock. Um, actually, no," he finished lamely.

"So how is your friend?" Teal'c asked politely. Daniel thought about his not so sick friend from the night before with the sweetly kissable mouth and the delectable body hidden under the baggy clothes. She was something so unexpected that she was almost like a scientific breakthrough or a spectacular archeological find. "DanielJackson, how is your friend?"

"Oh, sorry, I was just thinking about her chest… x-rays," Daniel responded. He quickly changed the subject, saying, "Did you all have a good time last night?"

"It was most interesting, DanielJackson," Teal'c said. "GeneralO'Neill invited that Captain who did the imitation of you in the bar. You told me then, I think, she was sort of talking you down in general."

Daniel nearly dropped the phone. "He did what? He knows her?" He realized that he hadn't told Teal'c about Deeje's suspected more serious acts beyond casting professional doubt on him nor that Deeje was his daughter and so Teal'c didn't realize how insane it was that Jack would stage this sort of surprise.

"Apparently she is the protégée of a ColonelPrior who is an old friend of GeneralO'Neill. ColonelPrior asked GeneralO'Neill to look out for her," Teal'c explained matter-of-factly. "I suspect that after you told GeneralO'Neill the story from the bar, he thought that the two of you should meet and get past whatever the problem is. GeneralO'Neill was very disappointed when I told him you were not coming."

Daniel groped behind him to find the marble planter and a seat. This was not a standing up kind of conversation any more. "How did she and Sam get along?"

"ColonelCarter was polite. She is always very polite."

Daniel reflexively touching his cheek, felt a sort of phantom stinging. He thought, "Not always, Teal'c." Aloud he said, "But?"

"Yes, there is a but," Teal'c agreed. "She was very angry at GeneralO'Neill under the polite words. They were in the kitchen together having a very bad argument in very low, polite voices. CaptainCox and I were left alone together in the living room and it was very awkward. CaptainCox left almost immediately after that. She was also angry with GeneralO'Neill I believe."

"That's all sort of hard to understand," Daniel said. "Okay, well, I should let you go. I've got a movie to see that's about to start. Will you be on base tomorrow?" Teal'c assented and they made plans for lunch.

Daniel put the cell away, feeling numb but hot and cold at the same time. He was convinced that only the lingering dose of Bertie medicine, still buoying him even in the midst of all this craziness, was allowing him to function at all. So Jack was coming out of the closet about knowing Deeje. The timing was interesting to say the least. Jack's audacity in staging this meeting without consulting him first, despite what he had told him about not being ready to meet her, staggered him. He wondered if Jack had revealed to Deeje that Daniel knew he was her father or if Deeje even knew that Jack knew it.

At that moment, the cell rang again. He almost didn't fish it out of his pocket and check the caller id since it was about time for Jack to annoy him again but thought crossed his mind that it might be Bertie and so he looked. The cell phone almost hit the hard tile floor of the theater lobby a second time. It was Sam.

He was too curious to not answer and she couldn't very well slap him through the phone, could she? "Hello, Daniel?" came Sam's voice sounding tentative and on the edge of upset.

"Colonel Carter," Daniel responded, "may I help you?" A woman walking by with her young daughter looked at him curiously. She had overheard his formal greeting and tone but she was looking at body language and an expression that went better with "Please tell me my entire family wasn't wiped out by terrorists."

"Yes you can. I would really like to see you. Do you think you could come over?" Sam said, her words little white flags hoping to be respected under the conventions of war.

"What would be the point?" Daniel asked, not feeling the least bit interested in seeing her. Despite the fact that he knew he had been drifting into rampant paranoia of late, it seemed like an inescapable conclusion that Jack knew Daniel knew something and Jack had roped Sam into contacting Daniel. Daniel wasn't okay with Jack at all. Jack had lied to him about Deeje. This business about his interest in her being on the behalf of his old colleague smelled like a convenient cover story given the intense argument he had witnessed through the window in the rainstorm.

"Please Daniel, it's important to me. There was a time that would have been enough," Sam said, her voice breaking a little.

"To every thing there is a season," Daniel quoted. Then the little girl, now sitting on a bench across from him, gave him a huge smile and suddenly he felt old and mean and used up. He couldn't let whatever his friends had done make him less than the man he wanted to be. "All right," he said, heavily. "I'll drop by after the movie. I guess with travel time and all that'll be about 9:30. Okay"  
The movie had been a comedy and he used its better lines and thoughts of Bertie as a sort of armor to get himself prepared to deal with whatever pro-Jack arguments he was going to get from Sam. She greeted him, looking very, very young and vulnerable, even given the advantages the Gate effect gave her. She wore a very soft, pale blue sweater, with a big cowl neck. It hugged her neat curves and set off her blue eyes, shining with something. Tears? She wore soft pink lipstick and she smelled like something faintly floral, more than her normal soap and shampoo smell. She took his hand and pulled him into her living room and down on the sofa next to her. "Daniel, I want to apologize to you."

He looked at her coldly and said, "If I'm supposed to reciprocate and say I want to apologize to you too, it isn't happening."

"You're angry, not just hurt," she said with a hint of surprise in her voice.

"God, you do see me as some sort of toothless, old hound, always ready to come to heel when you call and panting eagerly for any crumb from you, don't you?" He stood up. "Coming here was a bad idea," he finished.

She jumped to her feet. "Daniel," she sighed, "Daniel, I don't see you that way but I've been a real hypocrite. Instead of telling you how I felt, I've been expecting you to read my mind and then being irritated when you didn't. You're not being fair now. I know I don't have a right to expect fairness but you aren't. Please try to be yourself, your fair, dear self. I promise you won't regret it."

He didn't sit back down. "I'm being as fair as I can. What is it you want to say?"

She moved closer to him and said, "I've always heard that actions speak louder than words." She rested one hand against his chest, brushed the other against his check and then she kissed him. Tears started to roll down her face. The salty water washed their joined mouths while her tongue sought entry. It was a deep, hungry kiss that mingled with the tears and it didn't just speak, it shouted. 


	7. Chapter 7

For a few precious moments, Daniel lost himself in the experience. He tasted her tongue along with her tears and he knew he would never forget the taste of that kiss. He slid his hands down her back and pulled her against him hard. She reciprocated by trailing her hand from his chest down his body, grabbing his backside and bringing them even closer together. His tongue slid over hers and he ached to get even closer but there was too much broken in his heart and mind for his body to have its way. All too soon, he found himself distrusting the feelings he was having and, even more, distrusting her motivation. Her actions were indeed speaking louder than words but he lacked confidence that he spoke the language as well as he should. He broke the kiss, set her away from him, and said, "I don't understand. I'M not going to slap you but I don't understand."

"You've got years of accumulated hurt, don't you," she observed, making a statement, not asking a question. "Every one of us, May, Sara, Sha're, me, cutting on you," she laughed ruefully, hollowly, "You really know how to pick women."

"Don't you dare pity me," he barked at her. "Why do I keep letting down my guard with you?" Once again, he turned to leave.

"DANIEL JACKSON I LOVE YOU," she yelled. She ran around in front of him, continuing her bellowing. "I AM IN LOVE WITH YOU. I LUST FOR YOU. I WANT YOU. I NEED YOU. I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, LOVE YOU AND I DO NOT FING PITY YOU." Then she kicked his feet out from under him, bringing him to the floor. It knocked the air out of his lungs and while he was at a disadvantage, she tackled him, sitting astride him and pinning his hands to the floor on either side of his head. He gasped for breath and stared at her. He was pretty sure he didn't remember falling asleep at any point but this had elements of a very surrealistic dream. "I'd take your glasses off," she said in a normal voice, "and I will in a moment, but I want you to see my face clearly when I say this."

She shifted and he stifled a groan, "I have never experienced anything as awful as when you ascended. It made me realize how integral a part of my life you were. After that, I knew I could never take a chance on loosing you. The odds of loosing someone you have a love affair or even a marriage with, are huge. In my experience, it way increases the chances. My parents' marriage disintegrated before my eyes. They lost each other years before she died. He had an affair toward the end. He had no idea I knew. He lost her too. Then there was the disaster with Jonas and before him the boy I dated through high school and between them someone I was involved with for two years. I didn't consciously think all this through, of course. I've lived my life in denial, right here in Colorado minus the pyramids." He wasn't even smiling at that and she bit her lip and plowed on.

"After SG-1 disbanded, we started drifting apart, just a little at a time. The days were just, I don't know, flatter, and I felt lonely. I missed you. By the time you kissed me in my lab, before I slapped you…" she said.

Daniel finally had enough breath to interrupt, "No need to qualify it, Sam. That was the one and only time before tonight we ever kissed." He had to say something distancing. He still could not trust what he had heard because if he did and she pulled the rug out from him, he was in the next party through the gate, sans trade goods.

"Shut up," she said, evenly, and continued, "I'd started wondering about us, trying to figure out how things had changed and seeing new explanations for some of the things you'd said or done. But I thought I might just be desperate, reading in something that I wanted to be there, and if I made a move and I was wrong, that would really distance us. So I wanted you to do something, damn it. But when you finally did, I felt more like a tree that some dog was using to mark his territory, a bone in a battle between you and Jack. I had spent some serious hours in the tub with bubble bath and a glass of wine and you weren't playing by the script."

He squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again. She was still there, still sitting on top of him. She reached down and tugged off his glasses and put them on the coffee table, a couple of feet from where he lay. She released his hands, rolled off of him, and pulled him part way over on top of her. "You can say it," she said, as she loosened his shirt and ran her hands up his back on his bare skin.

The corner of his mind not fogged with raging desire knew something was missing. He should be feeling triumphant, overjoyed, whatever you felt when you finally got something you'd wanted for a long time. Had he unwrapped the most beautiful present under the Christmas tree and found bricks in it? She felt wonderful under him, she smelled so good, her face was as lovely as ever, and, if all of that wasn't enough to make him rock hard, her expression was naked, unvarnished lust. He was as turned on as he could remember ever being but if he hadn't been playing by her script, now, somehow, she wasn't playing by his. He ran his hand down her body because he had always wanted to and he might never get another chance. He palmed her breast and she pulled his head down, crashing his mouth down on hers, and unzipped his fly. She whispered again, "You CAN say it."

That was the shot of cold water he needed. He gently removed her hand from his crotch and struggled to a sitting position. "I'm sorry, Sam, but I can't say it. Not if 'it' is I love you." He added hastily, "I'm not saying that I don't but a lot has changed lately and I'm confused about what I feel. We need to ease into this. I don't want to have sex with you before I've had any kind of romantic relationship with you at all and then find out we don't really work as a couple. That will end our friendship AND mess up our working relationship. I don't want to say I love you for the first time when my dick is driving." 

She was looking at him with disbelief. "Guys don't say stuff like this, right? We're all supposed to be ready to do it at the drop of a hat with the least bit of encouragement and worry about what it means later and, come hell or high water, be uncomfortable with discussing our feelings." He looked away from her and into the middle distance, seeing May and remembering how he'd been such a goofy romantic about her. "You're not going to want to hear this, Sam, but I've kind of gotten myself involved with someone else. I haven't told her that I love her, I don't think I do, but I really value her. She's not a knockout like you who draws guys like flies. Her appeal is subtler and I think I could really hurt her if I don't break if it off the right way."

She sat up herself then. "If you were someone else, I'd suspect this was payback. But you're not like that. Everything you say makes sense on some level I guess but all I want right now is to feel you inside me so you'll have to be patient with my disappointment." She skimmed her hand up his thigh and said, hopefully, in a husky voice, "You are sure I can't change your mind?"

He smiled at her then and said softly, "Maybe you could but I'd really regret it later."

Sam nodded and got to her feet. She held out her hand to Daniel and said, "Let's start that couplish phase then. How about I cut you a slice of pie and we talk."

He nodded. "What kind of pie? I like pie."

Sam laughed, "I know. Don't you think I've noticed and why do you think I happen to have it in the house right now?" She pulled him up and they walked to the kitchen still holding hands, Sam leading the way. Just inside the kitchen door, she turned and said carefully, "I'm only going to ask this question once but I'm so jealous I can't see straight. Who is she?"

"You don't know her Sam and you probably wouldn't understand her attraction for me at first because she's a trifle eccentric but she's good people. I can't hurt her and I can't betray her by discussing her with you, okay?" he asked, tucking her hair behind her ear.

As they sat down at the table, Daniel had a question of his own. "Teal'c said you were angry with Jack Saturday night. Do you want to tell me about what went on?"

Sam went from smiling somewhat sappily at him to hot anger at warp speed. "He had Deeje there and was just, apparently, planning on springing her on you, forcing the two of you to meet whether you wanted to or not. I didn't think he had the right. He doesn't believe she had anything to do with the poem or the rumor about our sexual proclivities. She told him she didn't and he believes her."

Daniel looked amazed, "You're mad at Jack."

"I've been mad at Jack plenty of times," she said.

"You've been annoyed with him or exasperated with him over mission decisions, command decisions. I don't remember you being really angry with him about personal things." Seeing her expression, Daniel held up a hand and tacked on, "I'm just saying I haven't noticed."

"Women are like bears when it comes to people going after someone they love. When he treated you and Deeje like two little kids whose parents had to make play nice, he infuriated me. Quite honestly, I didn't much like your daughter. She's got a lot in common with Jack which just doesn't work as well on a woman as a man, sexist as it may be to say, but I felt sorry for her. The looks the two of them were giving each other were, well, I owe you an apology for biting your head off for raising the possibility of something between them."

Daniel leaned forward and looked at her intently, "Are you saying.. I mean you do you really believe that.." He could not get it out.

"No. I don't know. He restrained himself with me all those years and I know he felt something intense. Or maybe it's some other type of deep feeling and affection. Everything isn't sex. But he sure lied to you when he said he'd just met her once."

Daniel shook his head. "I can't figure out why he did that. Surely he didn't honestly think I'd never find out."

"If he's feeling guilty about something, instant, unthinking denial is the knee jerk response, isn't it?" Sam asked. "It wouldn't have to be guilt about something he did. It could be guilt about something he wants very much to do. Or, as I said, the feelings there could be something other than sex. Any relationship with her, given her relationship to you is awkward, right?"

"Let's not talk about it any more," Daniel said then. "How about if we pick out a DVD, get one of those ratty afghans of yours, get cozy, and watch it? Something funny would be nice."

"You're not afraid to be cozy with me, huh, Dr. Jackson?" Sam asked archly.

"No touching below the belt," Daniel responded.

She started to laugh and then, sobering, said, "My God, you're totally serious."

"I'm not made of stone, Sam. You are incredibly hot but I really don't want us to have sex yet. I think it would be a mistake."

"Are you sure you're not actually a girl?" she said and then winced, afraid she'd really insulted him.

"Look, I'm not all about being someone else's definition of masculine or feminine, Sam. I wired up however it is I'm wired up. I'm not Jack or Jonas or Pete or any of the other aggressively testosterone versions of male you've been enamored of.

Sam interrupted, rolling her eyes, to say, "Please, definitely not Jonas."

"Sam, you must have been interested in him. You WERE engaged to him after all," Daniel said, a little irritated at the interruption to his exposition.

Sam grimaced and said meekly, "Oh THAT Jonas. Well, never mind."

Daniel resumed where he had been interrupted, "I'm real comfortable with who I am. This isn't going anywhere if you want to be with me so you can 'fix' me."

"I don't want to fix you, Daniel. And, to reiterate from earlier, I don't pity you. Are there any other insecurities/paranoia we need to put to rest?" She sounded a little exasperated.

"I'm afraid my girl friend is going to be one of those who never shuts up," he said, mostly teasing.

"There's a way to shut me up," she said suggestively.

"Go find a comedy DVD, Sam," he directed but indulged himself by patting her butt as she stood up and started to move away from him.

They had decided to keep their relationship just between the two of them for awhile. Not only was it less awkward at work, particularly given the rumors about their sex lives that had been flying around, he also didn't feel right about being official until he had dealt with the situation with Bertie. The opportunity came to do just that when Bertie called him to say she had what might be his final report for him. Two of the other Covenant House alumni they tracked down from Deeje's days there had the answers. It was up to him to decide if he wanted to spend any more money further verifying the story and digging up more details.

Daniel asked, "Is it really bad? Was she turning tricks to make it on the street?" Spoken aloud, his secret fear sounded so ugly.

"No. Not according to our informants. We did learn DJ was one very successful little thief. And there is something else, something ugly." She paused. "Damn it, Daniel, I didn't want to give you this over the phone. Can we talk in person?"

"You have to at least give me the outline now though. I could imagine myself into a stupor. The possibilities are pretty grim, aren't they?"

"If I tell you, will you promise to come over and let me feed you tonight. Give you the full report?"

"You don't have to bribe me to get me to want to see you," he said, hating the fact that although that was true, he couldn't be faithful to Sam and continue this friendship in the same way. He had to give it a chance with Sam, didn't he? He hadn't been at all sure of his feelings for Sam lately but he'd loved her for too long not to give it a chance.

"Okay. You do have a tendency to make me do things outside my personal rules. Your kissing should have a warning sign on it." She paused a beat. Whatever she had to tell him, Daniel knew it shouldn't be in the same breath as flirtation. "These girls on the street are in a really precarious position. It's not unusual for them to be," she hesitated and then almost whispered the word, "raped. Both informants are sure DJ was, at least once."

"Raped. My daughter was raped," Daniel ground out. That had been his other secret fear. It wasn't what Malva had said about some fathers not having any use for their daughters if they didn't remain pure. It was just that sexual abuse in some form, and prostitution when done for survival was a form of rape by the johns in his mind, was something a father should be protecting his daughter against. If Deeje had been forced to sell herself or had been raped, that was the ultimate failure of his protective responsibility.

"Daniel, do you understand why I didn't want to give this to you on the phone? I know you're not all right." She still sounded upset. "You are such a good man and you've already started flaying stripes of flesh off your back. But are you going to be able to keep going through the day and make it over here?"

"You sound like you'd come and get me if not," he said. As bad as he felt, he couldn't help but feel warm at her concern and friendship.

"I would and I will. Just say the word," came the return offer.

"You are a wonder in every respect, Bertie," Daniel said sincerely. "I was prepared for this on some level. I actually started a sort of anticipatory flaying when I asked you to look into where she went and what she did. I'll make it through the day and I'll see you tonight."

After he ended the call, he continued to sit unmoving, almost unblinking for a long time. Then he knew he had to tell Sam and he had to tell her that he was going to go to Bertie's for one last private time with her. What he didn't know was how he was going to thank Bertie for the lifeline she had been for him and yet walk away from her without damage. And even more than that, he had no idea how he would ever expiate his failure to protect Deeje.

He got up and headed for Sam's lab. Whatever else he did, the time for avoidance was over. 


	8. Chapter 8

Daniel didn't commit it to paper but he had a list and he was determined to stop shying away from facing the hard things it contained. He now knew the limits of the awfulness that had befallen his daughter. There were still blank spaces that would give color to the sad story of her childhood but he had the outline and he knew just how much he had failed as a father. Ever since he had learned that she was at Cheyenne Mountain, he had told himself that he would seek her out as soon as he knew for what he needed forgiveness. His only concession to his fear of the encounter, that was just as likely to end with her heaping curses on his head as forgiving him, was to move it after the two other unpleasant chores he also could not longer defer.

The least difficult was ending the tender young relationship that had just started to grow between himself and Bertie. He was going to miss her but if he was going to give it a chance with Sam and honestly find out if there was still enough left of his once consuming love for Sam to justify being with her, he couldn't be involved with someone else on the side. Bertie was too fine, in any case, to ever be delegated to that role. He and Bertie had a history of mere weeks. Ending something so new had to be easier than dealing with a daughter who had haunted the back of his mind ever since he had learned of her existence some 16 years before or confronting Jack, the man he had thought was his best friend.

Oh yes, Jack. Was he still his friend or was he, God forbid, a candidate to become his son-in-law? His skin crawled. Or, an even more distasteful thought, Jack could become his grandchild's father. Jack undoubtedly had information he needed to help him understand Deeje. That's what he needed to focus on.

He couldn't hide seeing Bertie from Sam but some instinct told him not to tell Sam yet about the rape. She would expect him to want to be with her for comfort and might see a rejection in his seeking out Bertie. In any case, Deeje's workplace was not the place to be discussing something so personal to her.  
He found Sam in her lab with two other scientists. He decided that it would be actually easier to tell her what he had to tell her in whispers than talk to her where she felt free to explode or, once again, slap him. She smiled, trying to simulate the way she had greeted him before they had spent quality time making out. He thought she needed practice. Her smile slipped as she saw the deep dejection in his body language and concern replaced it. "Sam," he whispered, "I just talked to the woman, you know, the one I've been seeing. I'm going to see her tonight to break it off."

"Oh really," she hissed. It was a pretty loud hiss and one of the other scientists looked up puzzled. She moderated her hiss down to a garden variety whisper. "I guess you have to. You're not the kind of man who would do this over the phone." He shook his head. "You don't need to look like it's the end of the world."

So she'd noticed but misinterpreted his unhappiness. "I just hate hurting people," he temporized.

She looked at him a little dubiously but moved to a new topic. "So, you're not going to touch her or kiss her, are you?"

He rolled his eyes. He couldn't help himself. "Sam, I'm not going to make out with her but I probably will kiss her good-bye." She glared at him. "It's not negotiable," he said flatly.

"My, that went well," he thought reflecting back on the encounter as he reentered his office to unexpectedly discover Jack O'Neill. "And this is going to be even more fun," he completed the thought.

Jack didn't initially pay any overt attention to him. He completed his circuit of the room studying every single thing, framed or stuck up with thumbtacks, on the wall, finishing at a photo of the fascinating funeral urn of a couple of months before. "You need to recharge your cell phone or learn to check your voice mail more often."

"Yeah," Daniel, said so dispirited that he just hoped Jack would go away and leave him in peace.

"Why, Daniel, did you not take my calls? Why didn't you show up to talk with me on Saturday and why didn't you show up Saturday night? I don't remember kicking your puppy at any point," Jack said, with a definite edge to his voice.

Jack going on the offense when Daniel felt like the one wronged shook him out of his lethargy. Jack was definitely the year's, hell the decade's, poster boy for sheer audacity. The anger felt good after the last half hour or so of guilt and sorrow and he went with it. "You're offended? You have the balls to be offended? I talked to Sam and Teal'c. I know you more than just met Deeje once. I know you were planning on trapping me into meeting her Saturday."

"I thought we were friends," Jack said and ripped the photo off the wall, rolled it into a tube, and started whacking it viciously against the side of Daniel's desk.

"Why are you attacking my photograph?" Daniel was seriously considering that maybe the explanation for this whole sorry episode as far as Jack was concerned was some sort of insanity. Maybe the ancient knowledge loaded into his head and unloaded more than once had caused some lasting damage that was just now showing up.

"Because it's easier than WHAPPING YOU ON THE HEAD." Daniel's mouth was hanging open now. "Daniel, you never talked to me. You never asked me what was going on." Daniel made a sound that stopped short of actual words. "Okay. I should have been more forthcoming with you at first but doesn't saving your sorry butt over and over again back in the day cut me any slack?"

"Jack, are you doing my daughter?" Daniel found himself saying and the euphemism just lay there between them.

It was Jack's turn for his mouth to hang open. "Let's not be shy, Danny," he finally said. "No, I am not 'doing' your daughter. Not any more than I ever 'did' Sam." He turned away from Daniel and went back to perusing the wall. "Not that I didn't want to with Sam and don't want to with Deeje. They're both off limits under my command and I take my duty seriously. And, like I told you before, you were always in the way with Sam. I never let myself fall all the way with her. And, as for Deeje, I'm an old man. The Gate effect makes me younger looking and more vigorous than most men 10 or 15 years younger but I'm still way too old for her. So there's nothing going on. But she's as stubborn as you are and she keeps coming at me."

"What were you fighting with her about Friday night?" Daniel asked.

"You were spying on me?" Jack said, his voice rising.

"No, Jack. I went over to see you and stumbled on it."

"I didn't know she was your daughter and when I first found that out, I wondered if she had gotten close to me simply to help her get assigned here, to help her in whatever vendetta she had going on against you. She convinced me that it started out that way but things changed. She also managed to convince me that she wasn't responsible for the poem or the rumor about the three of us. I never did think she would be capable of something that low but even if she were, I know she wouldn't do something that could hurt me that badly."

"So you buy everything she tells you?" Daniel said. "And don't forget to explain what you were fighting about."

"Daniel, Deeje is like no one I've ever known. She's at least as smart as Sam but she's much tougher. She's the kind of soldier I wanted with me in black ops, utterly fearless and ruthless when you need ruthlessness. She's got a delightful dry sense of humor. She's like the complete woman. When you care about someone, you have to believe in them." He turned to look at Daniel. "We've been fighting for a month now because I kept telling her she was wrong about you. That you both had been lied to about each other. That people sabotaged your relationship. She didn't want to hear it. Look at her life. She studied the same subjects at the same university as you. She came here and she stalked you for days when she was 17. Long enough to figure out that you worked on something highly secret for the Air Force and had been for years. Why do you think she went into Air Force ROTC? She's been determined to be better than you. To show you up and get even too. I was messing with that whole scaffolding. Friday night, we were fighting again over my insistence that she meet you."

"She slapped you over that? Seems like a mismatched reaction."

"You were the busy little peeping Tom, weren't you? No Daniel she slapped me because of something else altogether which is none of your business. You know when you start fighting with someone all sorts of off topic things get said because you're mad. I said something pretty stupid. I deserved to be slapped. If I hadn't deserved it, I would have slapped her back."

"She's a woman," Daniel said from some inbreed lifelong training about men not hitting women even though he had spent several years surrounded by female soldiers perfectly capable of beating him up.

"She's a soldier, Daniel."

"Whatever. So let's get back to the meet and greet. I believe I had been clear that I wasn't ready to meet her. I guess that didn't matter."

"It was tearing you up Daniel. It was tearing her up. I love both of you. What was I supposed to do?"

"Treat us like grownups," Daniel said, the heat gone from his voice. He wasn't angry with Jack any more. It had bled away in response to the anguish in Jack's voice over Deeje and him. "So, Jack, have you gotten anywhere with the 'Daniel's not really a bad guy?'" he asked without real hope.

"Not really. You're the Great Satan still. I think the only reason she finally agreed to come and meet you was she was trying to do something to dispel any lingering doubts I might have had about her feelings about me," Jack said, clearly discouraged.

Jack crossed the room to Daniel. "I don't do sorry well, Daniel. Are we okay about Saturday, about this whole mess?" He was doing his naughty little boy thing. Daniel was sure he didn't realize he did it but he had seen it work on women. Daniel sighed and then, despite everything, found himself laughing. Jack was such a bull in a china shop but it kept working for him. He'd had a professor once who had said that it was better to be lucky than good. Jack must be lucky or have some sort of very deep inner knowledge that no one else did because he kept charging around, brute forcing life, and yet succeeding.

Daniel put out his hand, "It's okay." He added, "really" as Jack stared at his hand as if he wasn't sure what to do with it. Instead of shaking it as Daniel expected, Jack grabbed hold of his hand and pulled him into a fierce hug. 

"Don't ever go away on me like that again, Danny," Jack said. 

"I won't. I promise," Daniel said, "but Jack watch the shit you pull, huh?"

That evening, he found himself sitting on the couch across from Bertie, full of an excellent meal and knowing that the time was right. "Bertie, I don't believe in talking with one woman about my relationship with another but I'm going to break that rule because it's the only way I can fully convey the huge impact you've had on me in a short time."

"You don't have to," she said, trying to derail him.

"I do have to. For years I believed myself to be in love with a woman who was in love with my best friend. I never said anything until a short time ago. She shut me down completely and it left me free to discover you. Then just Sunday night, she threw herself at me. She wanted to make love and I couldn't do it because of you. You've had that much impact on me in a matter of weeks. I'm not in love with you Bertie but I do love you. You've been so good for me that it makes me wonder about what I really do feel for her."

Bertie as always read him like a book. "But there's a 'but' right?"

"I have years invested with her. I have to be sure that there really isn't anything left before I walk away."

Bertie looked at him very fondly. "And you're all worried about how this is going to make me feel. Daniel, I don't like being dumped. Who does? But I wasn't in love with you yet. You've helped me more than you know and I am not a loser here actually. I think I'm starting to heal."

Daniel said, "You were raped, weren't you?" She shut down for a moment, her eyes shuttered and her face closed. "God, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have asked you. You would have told me if you wanted me to know."

"Don't apologize. You asked me because you cared, not out of prurient interest. It's a fairly awful story, a lot worse than the standard date rape, and I guess it explains some of why I'm a touch eccentric or maybe I've just used it as the excuse to be as eccentric as I always wanted." She touched his cheek for just a moment, a butterfly touch. "Someday when your lady is secure enough in her relationship for us to be friends or if she dumps you, maybe I'll tell you all about it."

"She can't stop me from being your friend, although, for now, it's a friendship by phone and e-mail."

"Daniel, she won't understand. Just stay away completely for awhile," she said briskly and stood, clearly signaling to him that he needed to leave.

He rose reluctantly. As soon as he was on his feet, she walked to the door and opened it. "Do I get a goodbye kiss?" he asked.

"Do you think we're living in some romance novel or fan fiction story?" she asked. "Of course not. Goodbye for now, Daniel Jackson. Have a good life."

There was nothing left but his final task. He thought about asking Jack to mediate but that wasn't fair to Jack. It didn't seem appropriate to corner Deeje at work. He had a feeling she would want their biological relationship to remain a secret and the confrontation could so easily become a scene. So the logical conclusion was to go to her house but he agonized over whether he should just show up or call her first. He thought about what he would want if he were her and he decided to call her.

He found out that she had gone through the gate and would be off world for a month, joining the original SG team when the planet turned out to have some unexpected risks. He couldn't feel this way for another month. It wasn't that he expected the encounter to make him happy but he did hope it would free him of this constant sense of dread. He WAS the head of the archeology department and there was indeed an unexpected major find on the world to which her team had gone. If the initial reconnaissance had indicated it, he would never have assigned the hapless Carl to the mission. What could be more logical than that he went through the gate to check up on the archeological work in progress?

As he walked up the ramp to the gate, he almost wished it would malfunction and kill him. He was meeting his daughter face to face for the first time and facing the reality of himself as a failed father. If she couldn't forgive him, he wouldn't be able to forgive himself. Hell, maybe he wouldn't even then. 


	9. Finale

If you've gotten this far, let me interject a note. I've had some people suggest a sequel. I wasn't planning one BUT if you are one of those who decide to give me feedback anyway and you would read one if I wrote it (and it was worth reading on its own merits), please let me know. Thanks!

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P4T978 seemed inappropriately pleasant for Daniel's mood and mission. The gate sat on a low hill with a park like setting spreading out around it of open meadow sprinkled with white flowers and dotted with small glades of very large ferny plants. The meadows segued into forest on the slopes of foothills climbing to the encircling peaks. The gate was off to one side of the valley, close to the blue-green forest perimeter. There were a few other low hills, mounds really, which Daniel knew were more likely the remnants of former habitation than anything resulting from geological events. Small streams laced the landscape.

Looking to his left where there was no sign of humans or ruins, Daniel felt for just a brief moment as if he was about to see Julie Andrews and a bunch of kids in uniforms come running into sight singing "Edelweiss." He frequently had these strange connections when first encountering new worlds, which fortunately he had had the good sense never to share. He thought it was his brain trying to make him comfortable with something totally new.

In the other direction, there was no "Sound of Music." Instead there was the sound of a typical dig, although minus a large number of local workers, buzzing in some other language. A group of about 15 men and women was moving among the upended stones of the ruins, working the site under the direction of, God love him, Carl. A soldier with a rifle slung over his shoulder came forward and greeted Daniel. He could see that there were three other soldiers around the site, clearly standing sentry duty as well as another soldier on the far side of the gate watching the other end of the valley. "How's it going in terms of safety? I heard there was something fairly nasty here that's started making trouble." he asked.

"No worries sir. Murphy and I are SG-24," he gestured to the other man sitting nearby, "and our CO and Captain Cox both have plenty of experience with combat command. The whole unit's got more field experience than most of the SG teams," the man said with pride. Daniel knew that SG-24 was one of the units that specialized in the more dangerous situations. "All of us are former special ops. We've got SG-31 with us and they're good people when it comes to a dust up. We are on a red alert status now sir. The CO revised the threat assessment this morning. We had an incident during the night. These things, whatever they are, they're smarter than we initially thought and angrier about our presence." He gestured toward the camp between the dig and the gate. "The CO'd like you to check in with him before you go to work, sir."

Daniel found the CO, Colonel Tang, in the command hut. There were precious few pleasantries before the wiry, intense man got to the point. "It's part of my job to know what's going on with my team and I know that Captain Cox has got some powerfully negative feelings about you. When we were informed you were coming, I took that into consideration. I don't like to complicate dangerous situations. But Deeje is the best at what she does and your reputation archeologically says you're the best at what you do. Deeje has managed to keep that idiot from your staff from making a complete mess of things but I need her focused on our military situation. She knows that I expect personal feelings to have nothing to do with the job and now I want to make sure you do too."

Daniel appreciated everything being out in the open. "Colonel, the thing with Captain Cox is one sided. I don't return her ill will. You have nothing to worry about from me."

Tang said, "I'm her CO. I've seen her personnel file." He was watching Daniel's face and saw the tell tale sign he was looking for. "You came here looking for her, didn't you?" he asked.

Daniel wasn't really surprised. If he knew what DJ stood for, the similar names must have at least raised a flag. "There really is a good reason in terms of my responsibilities to the SGC but I can't deny that I was hoping to see her."

"This is a combat situation although we do have far superior weapons and there don't seem to be that many of them. Whatever the two of you have to work out, this isn't the place for it. I'll send you back through the gate in a heartbeat if you lose track of why you're here," Tang finished in no uncertain terms.

Daniel had a strong suspicion he'd be ushered through the gate in fairly short order because there was no way he was going to do what Tang requested. He went to the dig and ruined Carl's day. Deeje wasn't around as he half expected her to be but he felt as if she was there as Carl complained about her nonstop, an amateur according to Carl, interfering with his professional direction.

He was assigned to share the tent occupied by Carl and another archeologist. As he slumped on his field cot, tired and heartily sick of the sound of Carl's voice, still whining in the background, he was beginning to think that he might be able to keep Tang happy after all. He had learned that Deeje had taken a reconnaissance team out in the morning and was not expected back until dark. That should be fairly soon but it might be hard to get her one-to-one, especially if she didn't want him to.

There was some noise outside and he went to the tent flap to see a group of three soldiers entering the camp. The officer was clearly Deeje. She left her companions and went into the command hut to report and they joined a group at a campfire. With the equipment they had brought with them, the campfire was completely unnecessary but it was comforting and camps often had them. Daniel continued standing in the tent opening and ten minutes later Deeje reemerged. She went away from the campfire and toward the last tent in the encampment and he caught up with her, just as she reached it.

"Captain Cox, might I have a word with you," he said, keeping it professional for the sake of anyone who might be listening and, in any case, not at all sure how she would respond to him calling her anything more personal.

He was no more than two feet away from her and his heart ached to finally see her face up close, even if it was in the fading light that cast shadows and hid her expression from him. "I'm not going to be able to avoid it, am I Dr. Jackson," came the answer, her tone emotionless. "For obvious reasons, I don't really want to share our conversation with the rest of my unit. Let's take a walk."

They strolled away from the camp although they didn't leave the perimeter protected by sensors and watched by the sentries. She stopped just inside of it and turned to look at him. "When I was a kid, I waited for you to show up for a long time. I guess it used up all my patience so let's get this over with," she spat out. Out of earshot of others, she was making no efforts to mask her feelings.

"Dani," he didn't know where that came from but it was what seemed so right to call her all of a sudden, "I'm here to beg your forgiveness and to hopefully at least help you to understand what really happened. I don't expect you to love me as your father or want me in your life but it's really important to me that you at least know you were not abandoned. That I loved your mother and I love you. One of the biggest regrets of my entire life is that I didn't have you both in it."

She wasn't saying anything and he couldn't see her face well now at all, night having fully arrived. He continued, going on because he had no choice but feeling increasingly hopeless, "Your grandfather told me you didn't want to see me. I actually came to Tennessee once but they kept you from me. My letters to you came back unopened. Then later, I thought I talked to you on the phone and got letters from you but it was your cousin Carson's daughter who basically used the opportunity to tell me that she hated me. They were keeping the checks. I never knew you ran away, that you didn't have a happy home."

Still she remained silent. "Can you at least tell me whether you believe what I'm telling you about how we were sabotaged? Whether you really think I'm the kind of deadbeat father whose only involvement is court ordered child support?"

Finally she spoke. "General O'Neill told me all that. He told me what you've done." She couldn't keep a hint of a fond note out of her voice as she said, "He thinks you're an absolute saint by the way. He told me that he didn't know how you manage to combine sainthood with being a pain in the ass but that it was your greatest accomplishment. I respect him and, honestly, it fits with a lot of things that never made sense to me. So, no I don't believe you were a total deadbeat dad but that still leaves how you got my mother drunk and took advantage of her."

"How I did what?" Daniel asked, stunned.

"My granddaddy told me. You got her drunk or she would never have let you do it," Deeje said, sounding so sad.

"Your grandfather lied, Dani," Daniel said, forcefully. "It was completely mutual. There wasn't any alcohol in sight." He moderated his tone. "I think I know what happened to you, what Carson tried to do and what happened to you in Chicago. That's what I regret the most -- that I wasn't there to prevent that. It isn't in me to treat a woman like that, to take advantage of a woman. It didn't happen that way."

"You know what happened to me?" her voice rose dangerously. "There's no way you could really understand."

"Dani, you've investigated me. You know my parents, your grandparents, died when I was 8 and I grew up in foster homes. I'm not going to tell you the whole story now but believe me I have a definite basis for understanding. The important thing is that you realize that after what I had experienced there was no way I was going to take advantage of your mother, force her into anything," he stopped, his voice breaking.

"Studies show that a large percentage of abusers were abused themselves," she said truculently.

"My God, Dani. Doesn't everything else you now know about me count for anything? Doesn't the fact that your grandfather lied about other things lend support to what I'm telling you? He couldn't stand the thought that his little girl would sin according to his definition of things, would have sex outside of marriage, so he had to have an explanation that put the blame somewhere else." Daniel was pleading and he felt like he was up against a brick wall.

Suddenly Deeje hissed, "Get down" and pushed him to make the point. Lying prone on the ground, she spoke very softly into her COM link, "I think there's something out there. The moons came out from behind the clouds for just a second and I saw something at 6:00 to the Gate."

She started to move forward quickly, but low, deactivating the section of sensors and its capability to shock in the section in front of them. She shook he head at Daniel as he came after her. He kept coming and counted it as a sort of victory that she didn't turn the array back on until he had cleared. They had almost reached a fern grove and suddenly there were explosions at all the sentry points. Deeje spoke urgently into her COM link as they continued moving. Then volleys of some sort of silent projectiles whistled into the camp, probably shot as a burst rather than targeted as a few sprayed out in the general vicinity, a handful even falling around them. A horde came out of the night, pouring through the sensors. It overwhelmed their capability. Several of the nightmare creatures fell but their fellows just trod over them. Deeje and Daniel continued to move into the shelter of the grove. A voice on the COM link said, "We've got the big weapons but we have several wounded. We think we can open a way to the gate but we have to keep moving. They keep coming in larger and larger numbers."

She said, "We're on the other side of them. Jackson's with me. Can you hold them off long off long enough to get to you around the flank?"

The voice said, "You've got until we've got gate access, Deeje. I don't want to leave you behind but we've too many wounded. If you can't make it, hide and we'll come back in force for you."

She rolled back to Daniel. If you go around and come at the gate from the side there aren't as many there. They can probably cover you well enough for you to make it."

He didn't understand. "What about you?"

"I took one in the leg. It's already numb. I wouldn't be able to get far on my own and it'd slow you down too much to carry me."

"Do you honestly think I would leave you here wounded to try to hide somehow from the night of the seriously ferocious alien monsters, or whatever they are?" Daniel activated his own COM link. "This is Jackson. Deeje is wounded. We're going to go into hiding. We'll be looking forward to some help real soon."

She didn't thank him. She just got right to business while tying a bandana around her own wound. "They came from the end of the valley where the pass is. It's strange that they didn't surround us. Come from both up and down the valley. I'm thinking there's something on up the valley they don't like. I found a cave up there. I think while they're still distracted we should get into the forest and go up valley."

The forest was 150 yards from their current position. There were creatures in sight on their other side still coming from the direction of the pass. The grass was high. Daniel said "You can squirm, even though you can't walk, right"  
She nodded and they began to proceed on their bellies through the grass. It was very slow because there was no easy way for Daniel to help her. Finally they made the forest and as soon as they were out of sight of the meadow, Daniel stood and pulled her up on her good leg. Her leg was seeping blood and he worried that they'd left a trail through the grass. He cut off the bottom half of his t-shirt and wound it over the bandage. Then he got her over his back in a fireman's carry. He had to stop and rest several times before they got to the cave. Despite his almost fanatical exercise routine, which had admittedly lapsed in the last month or so, she was a tall woman and heavy with solid muscle. At last they were in the shallow shelter and he could put her down the last time.

Her directions had gotten increasingly more difficult to follow and he could tell she was having trouble holding on to consciousness. "Let me take a look at your leg," he requested. He removed the bandana and saw an ugly wound. He had no medical supplies but she had a canteen at her hip with a small amount of water left in it. He inventoried what else they did have. They both had the standard field equipment all soldiers wore, his uniform and paraphernalia being like hers, just minus any indication of rank. He also had a clean bandana in his pocket along with a Swiss army knife, a package of Kleenex, and a roll of breath mints. She had her own Kleenex and Swiss army knife. "So," he said while he worked on her leg, trying to distract her, "you got my allergies? I mean you got Kleenex."

"No energy for idle talk. About to pass out. No fires, huh?"

"Deeje, I've been going into combat situations of sorts since you were a little girl. Give me some credit." He got no response for she had, in fact, passed out. She felt warm to the touch and there was no more water.

He took the canteen and walked a few feet from the cave, listening for the sound of one of the many streams, hoping they were near one. It was now the middle of the night but as if in answer to prayer, the clouds began to disappear and the moons shone bright again. His patience was rewarded and he discovered a tiny feeder stream close enough that he could still see the mouth of the cave. He braced himself against the cave wall and held her head in his lap through the night. She was warm but not burning up and he managed to stay fairly upbeat. Finally just before dawn, he dropped off to sleep.

When he woke, it was full day. She was sitting up next to him. "Good morning," she said, sounding friendly. "Did I hear something about breath mints last night? Maybe if we had a breath mint for breakfast, we could fool our stomachs a little." He pulled them out and doled one out to each of them. She shifted painfully and said, "I'm just going to imagine this is a nice biscuit with Virginia ham."

"How are you feeling," he asked, looking at her wan face intently. It was the first time he'd ever really seen it up close and in daylight.

"Not great but I think it's clean wound. So how long do you think it'll be before they come back?"

"I think the SGC takes care of its own, whoever they are. But we've got some added pull. Sam'll make sure Jack knows. He's a major big cheese now and here we have his best friend and the woman he loves. He'll be on it."

"He told you that?" she asked surprised.

"Yeah. He admitted that there's something between the two of you but he said he wasn't letting anything come of it given the regs."

She laughed. "Yeah, the sacred regs. Do you know half the women on some navy ships end up pregnant? But Jack O'Neill is going to follow the regs. I'm doing my best to wear him down. Does that weird you out?"

"Basically, yeah. You don't expect your best friends to get involved with your kids." He hesitated, then plunged ahead. "I don't want you to get your heart broken. There is no way anything will happen until he retires, if then. He's been emotionally unavailable since Charlie died. I think the chain of command thing may turn out to a convenient excuse and when he retires, he might find another."

"I think you're wrong. Let's talk about something else. What do you think of these beasts having weapons?"

Daniel laughed without any humor behind it, "Arming the animals. Wouldn't the Sierra Club love it. Either they're not animals or there's there something else there running them. I'm leaning toward the later. We didn't see any of them carrying weapons. Someone behind them was doing the shooting."

"I agree. You know, the logical thing for them would be to just tear the gate down, break the DHD, but I don't think they will. What do you think?"

"Is this a test Dani to see if I'm as smart as I'm reputed to be?" She laughed in spite of herself. "I saw mention in the field reports of previous campsites being found near the gate and previous excavations of the ruins. They didn't attack right away because they wanted us to bring lots of stuff though the gate and set up a camp. They've done a little minor harassment, even though it made us wary, to get us to bring more weapons here, more stuff, and to see what we'd do. Then when they figured they had about as much as they could reasonably harvest and we were still at a force level they could handle, they sent their animals in."

They stayed in their cave for three days. The breath mints were long gone and hunger was sharp but they had water and Deeje's wound did not get infected. And they talked. At first they spent hours on linguistics and archeology. She shared his enthusiasm for ideas and could get lost in them, just as he could, when she had the luxury to allow herself to do so. Sometimes it seemed like they were just two colleagues and then she would remember that she was supposed to hate him and make some cutting remark or get deliberately argumentative. She was even better at cussing in other languages than he and he took a sort of perverse fatherly pride in her when she leveled a few marvelously inventive diatribes of invectives at his head.

The second day, they talked about themselves, what they liked and what they didn't, what mattered to them. It turned out they both loved the television show "MacGyver." Deeje joked that with the two Swiss army knives they had between them, they should be able to build a Gate if they just put their minds to it and could find some duct tape. Deeje explained how Covenant House had gotten her off the streets immediately after the rape and helped her to find herself. She had been raised Baptist but an elderly nun, Sister Jean, had been the one who patiently, day after day, worked at getting through her barriers. Deeje's conversion and practice of Catholicism had been motivated by a desire to have something of the peace she saw in the nun. Daniel hoped she wasn't deluding herself with faith in something false like all the gods he had met in person with snakes in their bellies but he said nothing. Daniel told her something of his experiences in foster homes and the incident with Hathor and she realized that he did relate to her better than she had realized.

By the third day, the initial barriers had weakened and they started really talking about the problems between them. She persisted in calling him Dr. Jackson but allowed him to continue to call her Dani. It was clearly important to her that he believe that she was not responsible for the poem or the sex rumor. "When we get back, and I know we will, check out this guy, Dr. Lipscomb. I got a brainstorm and thought maybe they were inspired by someone who had the hots for Dr. Carter and was jealous of her relationship with you. Anyway, since everyone knows I hate you," she looked over at him and made a face. "Well I did and I'm not saying I don't still but you're making it hard for me. To get back to my point, people don't have any compunction telling me stuff they wouldn't want to get back to you or Carter. She really shut him down and in front of some other people. He's quite obnoxious and I'm sure he kept coming until she didn't have a choice. He's been saying stuff about her and you to anyone that would listen to him."

Daniel said, "If you tell me you didn't, that's good enough for me." She clearly appreciated his willingness to take her word for it and the atmosphere continued to grow more positive. Finally he had the courage to ask the question straight out. "Do you still believe I victimized your mother? Are you any closer to forgiving me?"

"Look, Dr. Jackson, you can't just turn on love or turn off hate. I made promises to my grandparents on their death beds about you," she said, not looking at him. They sat in silence. "But," she said, breaking the silence and startling him, "I have to tell a priest about it every damn time I go to confession, well that and the lusting in my heart stuff for Jack," she continued, overlooking Daniel's involuntary wince, "and it's getting stale. I don't think God's going to let me off this rock until I forgive you." She put out her hand. "I'm just offering forgiveness, not the whole daughter/father package you know."

He took it, saying nothing, his throat closing up with unshed tears. Two hours later, the COM link sprang to life. A respectable rescue force had arrived including a large, determined Jaffa warrior along with a general and the head of R&D, neither of whom had been in combat for years. They encountered no resistance at the gate, the entire contents of the encampment having vanished as if the Tauri had never paid a previous visit.

Daniel directed them to their hiding place. Most of SG-24 was in the party that arrived with a stretcher as were Jack, Sam, and Teal'c. There was a lot of hugging and general back slapping. He hugged Sam tightly but refrained from planting the deep kiss on her he wanted to. Their relationship was not ready for full public display. He gave Jack a hug while Deeje had to settle for a salute and manage her joy at seeing him so that it blended in with her general pleasure at being rescued. As he embraced Jack, Daniel whispered, "This is from ALL the Jacksons" and Jack gave him a quick squeeze that indicated he had the message and appreciated it.

Jack looked at Deeje and joked, "Good work soldier. I'm sure managing to keep this civilian alive took all your energy."

Deeje smiled, careful to keep it the right kind of smile. "Thank you sir." She gestured at Daniel, smiling, and said, "He actually has some aptitude for this sort of thing." Daniel gave her a friendly smile in return and felt amused, thinking of how half those in the little knot of people gathered around the stretcher had no idea of the strong currents of feelings swirling below the surface that couldn't be openly displayed.

Deeje wasn't done though. She grabbed Daniel's hand as the stretcher bearers began to carry her toward the gate. Her team mates were only mildly surprised. Sharing a foxhole did tend to settle issues. They were actually more surprised by her subsequent announcement to her team mates, even though they didn't pick up on what it signaled the way Jack, Sam, and Daniel did. Deeje said in a clear, carrying voice, "I decided something while I was lying around waiting for you people to get your asses organized to come and save us. I know it'll be a strain at first and fortunately you just called me Cox a lot of the time but I've decided to go by my real first name from now on. So no more Deeje. It's Dani spelled with an i."


End file.
